Posted on 09/09/2023 2:03:19 PM PDT by Ol' Dan Tucker
NASA has come under heat for the increasing cost of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which space agency officials have finally admitted to being unsustainable and unaffordable, a new report revealed.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Thursday that heavily criticized NASA for its lack of transparency regarding the true cost of the SLS program, which has already gone $6 billion over budget.
The SLS rocket launched on November 16, 2022 for the Artemis 1 mission, sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back. The 5.75-million-pound rocket is essential to NASA’s Moon program, with plans to launch Artemis 2 in late 2024 followed by the first crewed landing on the lunar surface as early as 2025 and another one tentatively set for 2028.
“NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of its most powerful rocket, SLS,” GAO’s report read. “After SLS’ first launch...NASA plans to spend billions of dollars to continue producing multiple SLS components.” Those components include core stages and RS-25 engines currently being built by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Each rocket launch requires four engines and two boosters; one RS-25 engine currently costs around $100 million to manufacture.
In 2014, GAO had recommended that NASA establish cost and schedule baselines for the Artemis program. Instead, the space agency “created a rolling 5-year estimate of production and operations costs to ensure that the costs fit within NASA’s overall budget,” GAO wrote in its report. That initial estimate, however, does not reflect the cost of the SLS program over time. As a result, ongoing production and other costs that followed the launch of Artemis 1 are not monitored.
NASA’s massive Moon rocket has been a budgeting nightmare. The projected cost of each SLS rocket has gone over budget by $144 million through Artemis 4, increasing the overall cost of a single Artemis launch to at least $4.2 billion, according to a report released in May by the office of NASA’s inspector general.
NASA officials that spoke to GAO acknowledged that at current cost levels, the SLS program is “unaffordable,” and “unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions.”
In an effort to decrease the cost of the SLS program over time, the space agency is working to implement these strategies: stabilizing the flight schedule, achieving learning curve efficiencies, encouraging innovation, and adjusting acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk.
The report shows skepticism over NASA’s game plan moving forward. “NASA, however, has not yet identified specific program-level cost saving goals which it hopes to achieve,” GAO wrote in its report. “NASA has made some progress toward implementing these strategies, but it is too early to fully evaluate their effect on cost.”
NASA is also considering other options, like operating SLS under a launch service model whereby the space agency would purchase future launches and payload capabilities from a contractor who would own, operate, and integrate the rocket, according to the report.
There is a lot riding on the SLS rocket and NASA’s planned return to the Moon, therefore the space agency is highly motivated to make it work. The future of its launch vehicle, however, might need to take a different trajectory in order to still be able to deliver the Orion capsule on its way to the Moon.
I have said this many times. Except for tourism, there is no reason to go into space, especially missions to the Moon or other planets. And, there is never a good reason to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on boondoggles such as the SLS.
There is nothing that can be done in space that can't be done cheaper, faster and easier right here on Earth.
If there were a profit to be made on ventures such as mining, private companies would already be doing it.
Now, what should occur is clean out NASA and get rid of anything not focused on its core mission. Further, it should be re-tooled to aid and support American companies going into space.
Meanwhile SpaceX has launched 60+ rockets this year and it’s still September and they are landing the boosters each time and reusing them.
I have said this here for years, it was never viable.
I knew some of the best Rocket Scientists in the business and they all told me that it would probably never work.
A lot of wealth in the asteroid belt. Far more than exists on earth, so that’s a good reason. I agree that there is no purpose in going beyond the asteroid belt.
The future belongs to whoever masters space travel.
Well, lets see here. The final shuttle mission launched in July 2011. Let me count the NASA missions in the past 12 years....................
Fair enough.
I should clarify my initial comments that manned space missions are a waste of time and money when unmanned missions are far more cost effective and can do the same job.
...Further, it should be re-tooled to aid and support American companies going into space.
As I wrote, if there were a profit to be made in space, American companies would already be doing it.
The cost of retrieving that 'wealth' will exceed the profit, especially if it's a manned mission.
Space exploration is a science driver, essential to civilization. Plus the danger of asteroid impact. We need some sort of deployable defense in orbit. It’s an issue that far outweighs “global warming” in importance, which is why it is getting the short shrift.
Now it does, sure. It was also not cost effective to do most everything we take for granted at one time.
One might have once hoped that this sort of nonsensical thinking would have died out once all the boomers raised on Star Trek died out. But then, unfortunately, they rebooted the series, thus contaminating the thought processes of succeeding generations of increasingly emotionally immature quasi-grownups.
"Space travel" is nothing more than a thrill ride for spendthrift billionaires, and that's all that it will ever be.
What was wrong with the Saturn c5??
Cost overruns and delays are a Government tradition.
They all told me that it would probably never work.
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Yep them thar rickety wooden wagons will never make it over them thar big mountains. Best stay home and leave them injins alone. Thems mean critters. Some of the best minds in 1805 said so.
SpaceX is doing most of the work, but NASA puts their name on the Space Station trips
Yeah, yer right man, we can use homing pigeons to let us know about those MIRV’d warheads coming hot over the horizon.
NASA: Well, back to the soundstage and the black cloth space background and papier mache Moon surface. The new cgi guys will make it look better than 1969.
Note: Just kidding. I believe Americans landed on the Moon. Too bad they didn’t say “We claim this for the sovereign United States and will use this military base to conquer our inferior enemies.”
When you figure in all the included muslim outreach and gender diversity, that price isn’t really so high...
/s
Other than the survival of Civilization itself that is. Once you have people routinely raising their family in Space it pretty much guarantees Civilization itself will continue.
The main obstacle holding us back is lack of profits. If it made money rather than cost enormous amounts it would already be in play. Automation will change that and a new industrial revolution and rebirth of freedom will begin.
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