SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.
NASA is wasteful, eh? Maybe that's because they have no incentive not to be wasteful..
I can't say NASA seems particularly wasteful outside ways in which they are mandated to be so.
This won't change no matter who you vote in. It's like hardwired into the system.
The incentive massively is instead in favor of that congressperson to have a space program that is meets some minimum bar of competence, and past that point do everything to benefit that congressperson's voting district such as mandate certain things be manufactured there, etc.
NASA's doing what they're told, and Congress is doing what we asked them to.
The whole point of the space shuttle was to have it service the space station, but the station wasn't greenlit. Instead we got a much bigger shuttle that was useful as a military asset but was a money pit with terrible safety record. Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations).
It's the first time that I heard this theory. Do you have any sources to read up on it?
I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).
I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.
I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society- Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat.
- The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations
- NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System").
So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy!
So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)!
Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.
"The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded... got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations"
LtCdr Joseph Rochefort, leading a team in Hawaii during the early months of WWII processing Japanese encrypted messages about an impending attack, got both the location (Midway Island) and the date (early June) right, while other cryptanalysts near Washington DC got both wrong. Rochefort was recommended for an award by Admiral Nimitz (CINCPAC, in Hawaii), but this was turned down by Admiral King in DC. Eventually Rochefort was re-assigned to command a floating drydock in San Francisco, about as much of a demotion as he could get. At the end of the war, Rochefort did get a medal, still over the objections of Admiral King. Some think this bad treatment was because Rochefort and his team in Hawaii embarrassed the crypt analysts in DC.
She then got promoted to lead Human Exploration and Operations - which is absolutely a promotion. In terms of putting US Astronauts in space, her crew dragon program as significantly outperformed SLS at an absolute fraction of the per seat cost. So yes, very embarrassing.
I'd have to look at timelines, but my instinct is Nelson likely came on and that pretty much marked the end of her career at NASA as a result.
She wasn't afraid to make the calls she thought were right, she was pushing towards fixed price awards even on things like HLS, and having her in Exploration Systems Development would just have ruffled too many feathers over time.
The whole lunar landing architecture was so comical. SLS launching Orion to lunar gateway? Lunar gateway in a nonsensical orbit that would have needed an an entire separate transfer vehicle to get to LEO where it should have been to start with?
“Why would you want to send a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down?” asked Buzz Aldrin, who called the Gateway concept “absurd.”
Kathy was involved in HLS selection I think - and when I saw they were going to maybe leave gateway out of architecture for first lending... you knew that common sense couldn't last!
The ihab module on gateway (currently getting maybe 800 million per year in funding) is going to have 53 cubic feet for FOUR PEOPLE!! The entire module has a diameter of maybe 4 feet BEFORE life support? And gateways orbit mean you can only get to it at a very specific time once a week basically .
They also needed to get Kathy L out who had started to push down manned mission cost (crew dragon etc) and I think they succeeded there - there was a push to get her off new projects and into just operations I think to keep her from disrupting the pork - even just by showing the contrasts to other approaches.
That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only.
> The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!).
We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars.
What do you think this _should_ have cost?
NASA's own Inspector General says, "... NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic" and "... a single SLS will cost more than $2 billion through the first 10 SLS rockets ... " [0]
[0]: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pd...
There were a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong. The chief among them was launch cadence and satellite capture and return missions. When these assumptions changed the cost values changed significantly as well.
> Why should we trust that this time will be different?
Do you understand the details of this specific contract? It's limited to 10 launches. It's structured quite a bit differently than the shuttle program was.
> NASA's own Inspector General says
Yes and did you read the recommendations and follow up from that same report? Or is this just a "haha NASA is dumb" rant that's become common around here?
I also think there is almost no chance anyone of these folks is going to do fixed price for EUS or whatever. Contractors are getting something like $600 million / year on this thing and have been hoovering the gravy for 7-8 years.
Remember that these types of forever contracts that take 20-30 years are also liked by the NASA centers who work with the contractors - it's very stable career / funding (ignore the waste). So NASA at the centers level is not fighting against this stuff (ie, it's not just congress that pushes this stuff).
All these pork projects got a huge win with Biden picking Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Do wonder if a bit of SpaceX hate played a role there :)
That's why SpaceX is supposed to fly an absolute gargantuan amount of mass both into lunar orbit, then down to the moon, then back off the moon! They are supposedly going to do 5,000 tons out to the moon, orbit, land and take off the entire 5,000 ton starship. Payload may be 100 tons +. It's a big if, but if they can anything close to this it'll be crazy.
Orion is weirdly heavy for the SM, and the SM is weirdly weak (I don't think it got redesigned when SLS came along).
They are trying to fix this at $600m - $1B / year with the Block 1B upper stage.
But SLS after $20B (+ another $20B for orion) definitely CANNOT get folks to moon and back. Orion payload is truly tiny.
I think SLS will be good for maybe some flyby missions to the moon? One way to keep it going would be to do a one rocket mars sample return option / dump Orion totally... That actually seems like a useful approach.
But its not clear to me that old space can do a fixed price contract, they are so used to cost+ they really need to be able to overrun budget. All these projects had initial budgets that are fractions of what they are now but with cost+ that actually is a positive for the contractor. And the headaches on a mars accent and return vehicle would be high.