NASA Hosts Teleconference on Getting Back to Work on HLS

This afternoon, NASA held a teleconference to talk about getting back to work on the Human Landing System (HLS) contract now that a Federal judge has ruled in the agency's favor in the lawsuit by Blue Origin and Dynetics against awarding the contract exclusively to SpaceX.  

The teleconference, full video at the first link, was just over an hour long.  

... NASA administrator Bill Nelson says that it will take the space agency some time to fully determine what and how much damage Blue Origin has caused. In the briefing, Nelson and associate administrators Kathy Lueders and Jim Free confirmed that Dynetics’ protest and Blue Origin’s protest and lawsuit have delayed SpaceX’s first crewed Starship Moon landing to no earlier than (NET) 2025.

As Eric Ralph from Teslarati put it in a Twitter exchange with Marcia Smith of Space Policy Online:

The article discusses a lot of details about the conference and they throw some information around that honestly surprised me.  It's worth reading, as is Marcia Smith's page of tweets while the conference was happening.  Bill "SLS" Nelson is still in love with his namesake program, and still ignorant of the world going on around him.  

Namely, exemplifying just how broken and deceptive NASA’s cost “transparency” is when it comes to SLS and Orion, the space agency used the briefing to announce its first updated Orion cost projections in more than half a decade. All the way back in September 2015, NASA announced major Orion delays and revealed that it had already spent $4.7B on the spacecraft and was committing another $6.7B through its first crewed launch – then scheduled no earlier than 2023.

That’s likely where NASA is getting its magically diminished Orion cost estimate. In reality, including Bush-era Constellation Program development that began in 2006, Orion will have cost NASA and the US taxpayer almost $22 billion by the end of 2021 and before a single full-up launch. Effectively doing the bare minimum to acknowledge a sanitized version of reality, NASA now says that Orion will cost at least $9.3 billion to its first crewed launch, which has been delayed to NET May 2024. It’s entirely unclear how NASA is calculating that deflated figure but in the six years since the space agency’s 2015 announcement that it would spend another $6.7B before Orion’s first crewed launch, it’s actually spent at least $8.4B and will have blown past the latest $9.3B target by mid-2022. Barring drastic funding cuts, Orion development will actually cost the US about $12.6B from 2016 to Artemis II and ~$25.8B since 2006 (not including inflation).

The worst of it, though, was that Nelson and Associate Administrator Jim Free seem to know little about what the HLS they've contracted for can actually do, and even less about contractor SpaceX. 

In an even starker demonstration of cognitive dissonance, when a New York Times reporter asked a hard question about the possibility of sidestepping Orion and SLS to get astronauts onto SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander, Administrator Nelson – having just repeatedly discussed Starship – fell back on an old boilerplate statement that “there’s only one rocket capable of doing this” – “this” being launching humans to the Moon and returning them to Earth and that “one rocket” being SLS. Association admin Jim Free also exhibited similar confusion, stating that “the architecture…just wouldn’t work.”

In reality, as currently contracted with NASA, SpaceX’s Starship Moon lander is a highly capable crewed spacecraft that will be refueled in Earth orbit before propelling itself to lunar orbit, where an SLS-launched Orion spacecraft would join it and transfer over three astronauts. Starship would then use its own propulsion to change orbits, land on the Moon, and eventually boost back into lunar orbit to transfer that crew back to Orion for the return to Earth. Nothing short of sheer ignorance – willful or not – could prevent competent spaceflight engineers or managers from understanding the possibilities such an architecture raises.

For her part, Associate Administrator Kathy Leuders, who was instrumental in the private launch programs that brought manned launches back to the US through SpaceX, seemed to understand the situation much better.  She remarked, "SpaceX has continued to make progress on HLS.  Working to fully understand that and make sure we can align milestones to safely return humans to the Moon." 

SpaceX illustration.