In an opening to an article about something that seems so esoteric as why this EUS exists, and tons of technical analysis, I just have to admire a writer that opens a piece like Eric Berger does at Ars Technica, starting out by entitling the article, “Ding-dong! The Exploration Upper Stage is dead”.
In his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck wrote of loss, “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
The death of NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out.
Eric then goes on to say that the end of the EUS came with no big announcement, no celebration, just the notice, “NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA).”
I just think his next statement should have more sarcasm and nastiness in it. He wrote:
If the Exploration Upper Stage was anything, it was a survivor—a testament to the power of pork, and the value of political support from key southern senators in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida.
This is truth that we're going through on the entire Artemis moon landing program - as comments to the previous post dove into last night.
The article is a good summary of the corruption in the program, characterized as just "pork (excess spending)" but that hides just who this extra money is going to. Certainly some of it went to the people working on things like building the new launch tower that the EUS requires - taller than the original Artemis launch tower (currently with the Artemis II stack on it). Some of it went to skilled workers doing complex, large (huge) jobs, but the overall picture is less of that and more of what we used to call waste, fraud, and abuse. "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine," gets morphed into, "I'll spend some money on your pet projects if you'll spend some on mine."
The original cost estimates of these projects are always instructive to look back on. Boeing’s initial contract to build the Exploration Upper Stage started at $962 million, and NASA planned to launch the rocket on the second flight of the SLS in 2021. Oops. As for the launch tower, the initial estimate for its cost was $383 million, but as of late, it was heading north of $2 billion. So we are talking billions and billions and billions of dollars for a relatively straightforward upper stage, using off-the-shelf engines and a large launch tower.
It didn’t have to be this way. Over the years, from time to time, a company like Blue Origin would show up and say, ‘Hey, NASA, we could provide you with a more powerful and low-cost alternative.’ And the space agency would just laugh and send them away with a pat on the head.
Again, it didn't have to be that way. There seems to be a new trending meme these days that shows something like the news media and says, "you don't hate them enough." That goes for NASA, and every other agency I can think of.
It was all staggeringly and stupidly expensive. And I just want to underscore this point: The Exploration Upper Stage did not, in any way, get NASA closer to landing the Artemis III mission on the Moon. Taxpayers were spending billions of dollars to hinder, rather than help, the United States beat China back to the Moon.
Finally, sanity has prevailed. Mere weeks into the job, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked at NASA’s convoluted plans for exploring the Moon and asked some simple questions. Like, why are we building a space station around the Moon when we, our allies, and our competitors are all much more interested in having a presence on the surface? And then, why are we spending billions of dollars on an upper stage that only exists to support that space station?
After he got the usual nonsensical answers, Isaacman made some decisions and, in a short time, rounded up political support to get Artemis moving. The expensive upper stage and its boondoggle launch tower? Gone. That space station that will be thousands of kilometers from the Moon? It’s not necessary. Instead, the space agency is putting its resources into returning to the surface of the Moon with the best available technology.
NASA should have selected the Centaur V upper stage a decade ago. The next best time was today. To his credit, Isaacman decided that vehicles to get us on the Moon are better than vehicles to enrich contractors.
The Hat with green smoke in the background strikes me as a reference to the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz," just as the title of the Ars article is a reference to the movie. Eric Berger (apparently) preferred a Texas-based explanation for the image, saying, "The Exploration Upper Stage was all hat and no cattle." Credit: Aurich Lawson | NASA
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