NASA Inspector General Tells the Truth on SLS

NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has been serving as an independent watchdog over the space agency's activities for over a decade since his 2009 appointment.  For nearly all of that time, he has tracked the Space Launch System rocket and its matching Orion spacecraft.  As Eric Berger at Ars Technica put it, this Tuesday, March 1, “he said the quiet part out loud.”

Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA's Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their "very poor" performance in developing these vehicles.

While it may be the first time General Martin has said it, this is far from the first time something like this has been said.  Over a year ago, private analyst Robert Zimmerman opined that the SLS was dying.  Around the same time, Casey Handmer asked “SLS: Is cancellation too good?” and the followup, “SLS: What now?”  I've quoted both and others several times.  What distinguishes General Martin's view, of course, is that his position gives him data the rest of us largely speculate on. 

Martin said that the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion. This is, he said, "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable." With this comment, Martin essentially threw down his gauntlet and said NASA cannot have a meaningful exploration program based around SLS and Orion at this cost.

Later in the hearing, Martin broke down the costs per flight, which will apply to at least the first four launches of the Artemis program: $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, $568 million for ground systems, $1 billion for an Orion spacecraft, and $300 million to the European Space Agency for Orion's Service Module. NASA, Martin said, had checked and confirmed these figures.

Eric Berger notes that $4.1 billion per launch doesn't include the tens of billions already spent developing the SLS and Orion spacecraft.  If that were to be amortized over the ten flights he was estimating costs for, which seems to be the way they should be accounted for, that $4.1 billion/flight would dramatically increase, possibly doubling. 

Five years ago, a senior NASA official told Ars Technica that NASA would like to get its operational costs for a single mission a year down to $2 billion or less. Another source at the time said the internal goal was $1.5 billion.

In the intervening years that price has doubled instead of going down.

During his appearance before congress General Martin criticized not the just the contractors but NASA itself for clinging to its "cost-plus" contracting instead of firm, fixed price contracts.  

"Part of it goes to the efficiencies of the underlying contractors, like Boeing," Martin said. "One of the problems we saw in development of the SLS and Orion—it's a challenging development of course—but we did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing's part, poor planning, and poor execution."

Then, unprompted, Martin continued to criticize the programs set up by Congress to fund the rocket and spacecraft. House and Senate members told NASA to use "cost-plus" contracts, which ensure that companies involved in the development and operation of these systems receive all of their costs, plus a fee. This tends to disincentivize timely work completed within a set budget. (Remarkably, NASA was told to continue using cost-plus contracts even after the development program.)

As always, the perpetual motion pork generation machine in congress was working.  Of course they got poor contractor performance; a cost-plus contract incentivizes poor performance and you always get what you incentivize.  The contractor bills their costs and gets a predetermined profit over their costs so that the worse their performance and the more it costs, the more profit they make.  

Make note that House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) took aim at NASA's commercial space efforts in her opening statement at the hearing.  She doesn't want NASA to purchase commercial services for spaceflight in the future, like the programs that gave them commercial cargo and manned flights to the ISS; she wants more SLS programs. 

"I find the sum of these actions to be very troubling," Johnson said. "And it raises the question of whether NASA will even retain the capabilities and workforce within the agency that will be needed to get US astronauts to Mars if all of these privatization plans are realized."

No, Ms. Johnson.  NASA won't retain "the capabilities and workforce within the agency that will be needed to get US astronauts to Mars" because NASA doesn't have them now to retain.  Shut down the agency, send them all home, and get out of the way.  If fake roadblocks aren't thrown in the way, private companies will get there. 

The first Orion capsule to fly stacked on the first SLS system it will fly on - in the Vehicle Assembly Building on the Kennedy Space Center.  NASA photo.