Chances are Orion is worse than you think

That is, unless you're privy to lots of inside information, Orion is undoubtedly worse than you think.  

Casey Handmer, whom I mentioned a few times on these pages (like here), does a deep dive on the Orion capsule called NASA's Orion Space Capsule is Flaming Garbage.  As you know, Orion is currently being prepared to bring a group of four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, a somewhat inferior version of 1968's Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the moon and famously aired a Christmas Eve broadcast to the world. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times, something Handmer says Orion will never be able to do.

Let's start where Casey starts. Orion is absurdly expensive to build and operate. According to Wikipedia, the Orion program has already burned through over $30 Billion. Yes, with a "B". You might remember that the Orion program has been in development since 2006, originally begun under the Presidency of George W Bush. Coincidentally, I was working on cleaning up this computer a bit and ran into pictures from the first flight of an Orion capsule on the Ares 1-X mission, the first (and only) launch of what was called the Constellation program. To borrow from the Wikipedia article:

The Ares 1-X vehicle used in the test flight was similar in shape, mass, and size to the planned configuration of later Ares 1 vehicles, but had largely dissimilar internal hardware consisting of only one powered stage.

Ignoring the dead end vehicle made from Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster sections, Handmer points out that if SpaceX had started at the same time as the Constellation program, "by expense alone, SpaceX would have shipped Crew Dragon by 2008, before Obama was elected. Going by schedule, even Boeing’s irredeemably broken Starliner capsule would have flown by 2018." Then he adds this statement for more detail in referring to duplicating Apollo 8.

But if all we want to do is fly around the Moon and back, a lightly modified Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy could have done this at any point since 2020. We could do it today, or tomorrow. It wouldn’t mean very much in the context of the ongoing Chinese land rush, but it could be executed for well under $500m if SpaceX was cooperative – roughly equivalent to a single month of burn on the SLS and Orion programs. That is, for the same budget, we could fly a crew around the Moon every month indefinitely. [bold added - SiG]

While it sounds cool, flying a crew Dragon (with four people) around the moon every month forever for the same cost as Orion doesn't do much for anyone's spaceflight goals. Still, Orion is a barely flown, barely developed vehicle. It has flown exactly once (November of '22) and its life support systems weren't even used on that flight test - there was no crew to need them. Yet Orion has taken four times longer and cost six times more to develop than Crew Dragon. Even that's not a fair comparison, because Crew Dragon today is already a seasoned operational vehicle that has flown many crewed missions, with a functional heatshield that has never shown any of the kinds of problems Orion's did.

When you factor in the way Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has been saying that Artemis and NASA are behind schedule because SpaceX hasn't finished the Human Landing System it's worth pointing out, as Handmer says:

Unlike SLS and Orion, which might one day manage to repeat a mission we first flew almost sixty years ago and which commercial providers could do for 1% of the cost this year, the HLS program is doing the hard part (actually landing on the Moon and then flying back) with less than $3b and has been in active development only since 2021.

At one time or another, Boeing and Lockheed seem to have hired every former senior NASA official who is still alive and who is for sale to try and sell Congress and the public on their version of reality. Telling your story is important, but it helps to have an actual story to point to, not just the ashes of $100b of private money and a system that’s still too dangerous and too slow to ever use.

A name you may have noticed joining in on the effort sell Orion and lobby against SpaceX may be familiar: Jim Bridenstine, former NASA Administrator and now a lobbyist for Boeing. Bridenstine did his job and pushed how Orion and SLS are just so superior to landing in the HLS, getting backed by the New York Times. Casey Handmer put this graphic together to put raw numbers in front of all the faces who need to know.

This isn't wrong so much as it isn't the full picture and Handmer points that out. In the upper right, that $31.6 billion cost doesn't include the SLS. Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b - so far.

As I always say, "it's not that bad. It's worse." Despite the $100 billion, the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule can't get to the moon. Orion is too heavy. Payloads are too small. These things have been known for a long time.  Here’s 434 pages of NASA talking around the subject last year without getting anywhere. Remember the talk about the lunar space station called the Lunar Gateway? That was originally done to come up with a way to get a system able to get to the moon without looking like complete and utter morons by throwing away everything they've done so far. They could dress it up with all sorts of fancy names, add new things like The Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit and more.

Casey Handmer's presentation is very readable, and very (Very) long. Using my "Print to PDF" option results in a copy to read from that's 63 pages long. I tried to get some good top level stuff here to pique your interest, but I'm not sure I'm doing it any justice.