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Wednesday, May 17, 2023

It's an Old Story about a Still New Program

Artemis is too expensive.  Part of that is because the SLS rocket system is too expensive.  Yeah, old news. 

What Artemis has going for it, besides its successful uncrewed test flight last November to December, is that it has wide support in congress.  Both sides of the Uniparty back the program, currently preparing for the 2024 Artemis II mission, a lunar flyby.  The problems were addressed this week at a meeting of NASA's Advisory Committee for Human Spaceflight.

The space agency's chief official for human spaceflight in deep space, Jim Free, discussed the budget from fiscal year 2024 through fiscal year 2028. During this five-year period, the space agency will spend at least $41.5 billion on the Artemis program, when there is likely to be a single human landing at most. This includes some staggering sums for the Space Launch System rocket, $11 billion, which has already been developed for this mission.

This $11 billion is approximately the same amount of money that NASA proposes spending on not one, but two lunar landers for humans, which are arguably as complex as the SLS rocket, which has been in development since 2011. NASA did not award its first lunar lander contract until 2021. It is not clear why NASA needs to spend as much money on a flight-proven rocket as it does on the development of two large and technically challenging human landers.

I want to add a comma to the last sentence in the first paragraph quoted.  It should conclude with “This includes some staggering sums for the Space Launch System rocket, $11 billion, which has already been developed, (/--**there it is**) for this mission.”  My point is to emphasize that neither Artemis overall or the SLS itself was not developed for this mission.  It has already been developed; it shouldn't need staggering amounts of funding.  

The problem is that none of this is new.  In 2019,  Ars Technica (same website) calculated a cost per launch of $2 Billion for the SLS.  By 2022, NASA's inspector general said $4.1 billion per launch.  Doubled the cost in 3 years - on a rocket in development since 2011?

For comparison, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can only lift about 2/3 of the payload of the SLS, but does so at $100 Million per launch.  In 2019, that cost was quoted as $150 million.  The $100 million price is from 2022.  That means two launches for the equivalent payload at $200 Million or about 5% of the price.  It's not as simple as just saying to swap over to the FH; the Orion hardware would have to be redesigned, but let's not get into the sunk cost fallacy.  All that money spent on development is gone.  The question is if we keep spending far too much on every launch or if we sink a little more money to cut launch costs.  If we could cut that $4,100 million per launch down to $300 to $500 million with new hardware costs (essentially doubling the FH cost by adding new Orion hardware), it slows the money-bleeding that SLS is set to do.     

This is all going on amidst the usual nonsense about the (imaginary) debt ceiling, going into "default" (only if they want to) forcing a balanced budget and possible economic turmoil that adds to this. The most recent Federal budget I found record of (article from 2012) was in 2009.  Federal funding these days go by concurrent resolutions (I've also read continuing resolution).  The CR process imposes its own hardships on NASA.  

NASA's budget request.  


 

4 comments:

  1. The thing is, NASA and SpaceX could easily spend some R$D monies into designing a larger fairing/upper support stage to Falcon Heavy, expanding the diameter (which SpaceX was at one time going to do, but decided that it was cheaper to make just one fairing size) to fit Artemis cargo demands.

    Or wait a couple years and redesign Artemis hardware for Starship launches.

    Or decide on a universal size and make adapters to fit Falcon Heavy or Starship or Vulcan or New Glenn or whatever.

    And still be cheaper than that abortion of a SLS system with throwaway RS25 engines instead of a cheaper purposely-built throwaway version.

    SLS is congressional/corporate welfare. How much money from the corporations being paid NASA monies for SLS is spent on congresscritters in order to keep the welfare program going? How much money are congresscritters laundering through corporations for SLS in order to line their (the congresscritters') pockets?

    Double plus corruption seems to be inherent in the SLS system. There's no reward for creating cheaper/better/newer. No reward for saying "This thing is broken and needs to be trashed."

    More and more, it looks like private spaceflight is what's going to get us... spin-stabilized artificial gravity space stations (two companies working on that,) inflatable habitats, space planes, lunar landers, space manufacturing and all that other science-fiction stuff.

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  2. Of course it doesn't need staggering amounts of funding but how else are our fine, upstanding legislators going to get their bribes and kickbacks?
    They can't all fly to the Ukraine to pick up their checks

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  3. By the time the Communist Biden Regime has finished destroying the country, there wont be a penny left for NASAs manned Lunar and Mars programs. At the rate of over 150 billion a year of taxpayer money that goes to the social welfare of the illegal population in America -a figure for years prior to Bidens open border treason, I would suggest that figure will easily rise to a trillion a year by the end of Bidens term. On the other hand, NASA might be reconfigured as Obama did, but instead of serving Islam, NASA properties will now be repurposed as estates to house and care for Americas invaders.

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