NASA shifting to new views of lunar settlement

Back in March as Jared Isaacman was settling into his post as NASA administrator, he had spent enough hours looking at what was being spent on the Artemis program and developing his own ideas of what was needed for his vision (along with the administration's) of what a settlement on the moon needed and began efforts to "trim the fat." Thus began a presentation called "Ignition" or "the Ignition Event" and Isaacman let the collection of programs he intended to cancel be known. Sure, there was grumbling from contractors who saw their gravy train being cut off. Completely to be expected.

“For too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder,” he said during the Ignition event in March. “Billions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don’t like it. The president doesn’t like it. The American people have waited long enough.”

We've talked about this to some degree, and a key part was canceling the Lunar Gateway - talked about in March but only officially told to shut down last week. 

On Wednesday, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General prepared a memorandum on the elements of the Artemis Program that NASA was canceling as its focus shifted to the Moon’s surface. These were:

• Exploration Upper Stage, an upgrade for the Space Launch System rocket
• Universal Stage Adapter, which links the Orion spacecraft to the Exploration Upper Stage
• Mobile Launcher 2, a larger launch tower for the upgraded Space Launch System rocket
• Habitation and Logistics Outpost, a habitation module for the Lunar Gateway

The memorandum notes that each of these projects has experienced substantial cost increases and numerous delays over the last decade.

“Over the course of their life cycles, the combined contract values for these efforts ballooned from nearly $2.8 billion to $5.9 billion and NASA extended their contracted delivery dates by up to seven years,” states the report by the inspector general. “However, our projections indicate that if NASA allowed work to continue to completion, the systems would have cost more and taken longer than what was on contract.”

Eric Berger at Ars Technica has done a feature piece on this, and for illustration chooses the least expensive module of the four, the Universal Stage Adapter. NASA contracted with Dynetics in June 2017 to design, test, and build this piece of spaceflight hardware. Not particularly big or exotic, the original contract awarded to Dynetics totaled $131 million, to which NASA added another $9 million for a payload separation system, so $140 million. 

At the time the program was canceled earlier this year, the contract value had grown to $353 million, with a delivery date delayed to September 2028. The inspector general’s report projected that the project would likely cost $497 million and not be ready until May 2030. 

Left to its previous price trajectory, $497 million is probably optimistically low, but it's pretty easy "in your head math" to see $497 is closer to four times the $131 ($524 million) than to three times the initial contract (or $393 million).

To reduce it to its essence, NASA was probably going to pay half a billion dollars for a tall (33 feet) but relatively straightforward stage adaptor. This doesn’t have propulsion or anything like that on board. On top of the cost, it was probably going to take 13 years to complete. 

Admittedly huge, it's a tapered pipe for a fancy, overpriced system. The only important thing it has to do is match the pieces it's installed between. 

A test version of the Universal Stage Adapter is seen at Marshall Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA