Don't Read This If You've Heard This About SLS Before

NASA says SLS is so expensive it's unsustainable.  

Ars Technica posts an article off this week's Rocket Report saying NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable.  

As the title says, everyone already knows SLS and Artemis are too expensive.  I couldn't tell you how many times I've written about it, but the last time I wrote about it I called it an old story about a still new program. 

Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program.

"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.

All of this reporting is either old stuff that we've all seen or small tweaks to that stuff we've seen.  In the past, I've focused on the RS-25 engines that SLS uses; four on each mission to be exact.   The RS-25 engines are also referred to by their old name, Space Shuttle Main Engines or SSMEs and were first built in the 1970s.  I've been reading and reporting about cost overruns on these engines for years now - and I think they're the reason somebody coined the term "Shuttles' Leftover Shit" for SLS instead of Space Launch System.  In May of '20, I found out that the first stage engines would cost $146 million per engine, so nearly $600 million ($584 m) for just the four engines of the booster core.  Engines that will litter the floor of the Atlantic after one use.  These were reused during the Space Shuttle days. That's not the cost of the core stage carrying them; that's simply the cost of the engines.   

In March of '22, NASA's inspector general said the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion.

In the source article, it's reported that NASA has released some hand-waving report about bringing the price on the RS-25s down to "$70.5 million by the end of this decade."  

However, NASA's inspector general, Paul Martin, said this claim was dubious. According to Martin, when calculating the projected cost savings of the new RS-25 engines, NASA and Aerojet only included material, engineering support, and touch labor, while project management and overhead costs are excluded. 

In a program that's for man-rated space hardware, how can anyone honestly not include project management and other overhead costs?  Many of us have said with space-rated hardware, the actual hardware is almost free compared to the overhead costs.  That was for satellites, though. 

As Eric Berger points out something we've said many times:

And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.

One option is to completely shut down the program.  I know it would give NASA management and the contractors from SLS and Artemis (not to mention their congressional lackeys) complete nervous breakdowns, but think of it this way: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can only lift about 2/3 of the payload of the SLS, but does so at $100 Million per launch price is from 2022.  That means two launches give a bigger payload than one SLS launch at about 5% of its price.  It's not as simple as just saying to swap over to the Heavy; the Orion hardware would have to be redesigned, but let's not get into the sunk cost fallacy.  All that money spent on Artemis/SLS/Orion 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 $4.1 billion per launch down to $300 to $500 million with new hardware costs (essentially doubling the current FH cost by adding new Orion hardware), it saves the money-bleeding that SLS is set to do. 

Artemis I vehicle on the pad September 1, 2022, before a series of things (including hurricanes) forced the mission to be delayed until November. Trevor Mahlmann photo.