The Biggest and Most Expensive POS in History

If you were asked to name the biggest and most expensive POS (piece of shit) in history, what would you vote for? Yeah, there's an implication there that you know something about every POS ever built, and you have justification based on real data of why you name that one and not all the other bad examples. So let's simplify it to the biggest POS you've ever heard of. 

I'm going to vote for the Space Launch System, the SLS, currently in the queue to take the Artemis II crew to loop around the moon and come back to Earth. That's a link to a piece on Ars Technica by their senior space reporter Eric Berger and let me emphasize he DOES NOT SAY THAT. That's my line and I made it up. Eric knows the industry and the players better than I do, and honestly isn't going to say stuff that I'll say. 

Eric opens with the viewpoint that NASA knows the two biggest issues with SLS - and anyone who has been following Artemis knows

The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.  

I’ve reported on the expense of SLS so many times it makes me sick. The SLS, so far, has only launched one time, and that was with actual, already-flown, leftover Shuttle RS-25 engines, also known as Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs). They are 512,000 pound thrust – which may have been remarkable in the 1970s but common now. Both the Blue Origin BE-4s and the SpaceX Raptor engines, all versions, can do it. The SSMEs cost around $125 Million each. The Raptor 2, 3, or 4 engines are in the vicinity of $2 million Blue Origin sells the BE-4 for less than $20 million.   

Think of that. There are four SSMEs on one SLS core, or $500 million. Four Raptors are $8 million. The problem is that SLS can’t just switch because SLS runs on Liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen (LOX) and the other engines run on methane and LOX.

If you keep going down this road, you’ll find that an SLS launch has been priced in the vicinity of $4 Billion. Several times I've pointed out that while the SLS can deliver heavier payloads to orbit than a Falcon Heavy mission, it's not many times the payload, it's only like 130% of a FH launch. Two FH launches will launch more payload than one SLS and cost about 8% of one SLS launch. 

Granted the Falcon Heavy didn’t exist when SLS started up, but how do they stick with SLS with facts like that in their faces? 

Then there’s the ability to make a schedule. As I’m sure you’ve read the Wet Dress Rehearsal Monday evening failed miserably and the current launch schedule is No Earlier Than March 8th. Eric presents lots of info on the one test flight of the SLS, from November of ‘22 that I’d forgotten. 

The SLS rolled out of its hangar and to the launch pad in March. That was followed by failure after failure to fuel the rocket and get it to launch. It took seven attempts to run the WDR and it comes across as the engineers saying, “screw this, we’ll never get it to pass the WDR, just launch that MoFo and see what happens.” I bet that wouldn’t - or shouldn’t - happen with a crew onboard.

Since it’s such a great turn of a phrase, I’ll quote Eric on this:

That was November 16, 2022. More than three years ago. You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues. 

You would be wrong. 

There’s more than just that big problem with fueling here. Because the empty rocket is so expensive, about half the $4 Billion per launch, the program is “hardware poor.” They can’t afford to build test cases to learn more about how they’d behave. A rocket that is so expensive it only flies rarely will have super-high operating costs and ever-present safety concerns precisely because it flies so infrequently. 

Until this week, NASA had largely ignored these concerns, at least in public. However, in a stunning admission, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledged the flight-rate issue after Monday’s wet-dress rehearsal test failed to reach a successful conclusion. “The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion,” he said as part of a longer post about the test on social media.

The reality, which Isaacman knows full well, and which almost everyone else in the industry recognizes, is that the SLS rocket is dead hardware walking. The Trump administration would like to fly the rocket just two more times, culminating in the Artemis III human landing on the Moon. Congress has passed legislation mandating a fourth and fifth launch of the SLS vehicle.

Gee, Congress overruling logical, reasonable requests and setting it up to (I'll bet) get them more money to scrape off the contract for themselves. Who woulda guessed?

Isaacman needs to do what he can to get funds to the two competitors working to replace SLS and replace it as fast as possible. If I was riding that thing to get into orbit, I’d like it to be more like the Toyota Hilux of space vehicles, one cranked out by the million with an incredible record of survival in the worst of conditions. SLS is more like a piece of sculpture worked on by an artist. No two will ever be the same. Every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. 

Looking up at the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as they roll to Pad 39B. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica