Finally, we know production costs for SLS and Orion, and they’re wild | Hacker News Reader

Finally, we know production costs for SLS and Orion, and they’re wild

arstechnica.com

14 pointsdotnet008 comments

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To summarize:

Per Launch:

- $2.2B for SLS

- $568M for ground systems

- $1B for Orion

- $300M for Orion's Service Module

NASA's Inspector General plainly says "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.".

The absurd costs of the program relative to results produced are I think well known to enthusiasts, but the actual numbers are still crazy to see. Nice that at least someone at NASA is talking openly about how unsustainable this is for Artemis.

And the total program cost will be $93B for 10 missions.

I interpreted that as $93B for everything including Gateway, Human Landing System and all the commercial science landers due to start launching this year.

Although yes, the vast majority of that is still SLS and Orion. From my count ~$44.5B has been spent on SLS and Orion already.

Considering Gateway has no reason to exist except as a place SLS can get to, it is worse.

The companies building that stuff should be planning on it all being cancelled suddenly. Maybe walk away from the contracts, ahead of time. Anybody working on it should be finding other work, pronto.

> NASA's Inspector General plainly says "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable.".

"Unsustainable" means "it cannot be sustained". That is up to Congress - if it comes with requests and money, NASA will do - will have to do.

Now the question is, do we, the people, want to spend our billions this way? Are congressmen and congresswomen aware about our opinion on this subject?

They're aware that they haven't been voted out of office.

Probably the most important part:

>Martin also said NASA is obscuring costs that it is spending on the Artemis program and that, in aggregate, his office believes NASA will spend $93 billion from 2012 to 2025 on the Artemis program.

Nasa has to scrap operational plans every 8 years of the rotation of Congress. And when they do have plans in hand, they have to do everything like some kind of ala cart ordering while Russia or Space X can simply manufacture everything themselves in the same organizational unit.

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