NASA announces overhaul of Artemis program amid safety concerns, delays
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SLS, a rocket derived from Shuttle tech, takes astronauts on the Orion spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon. From there, a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin will take the astronauts to the surface and then back to Orion. The astronauts will then return to Earth in Orion.
Artemis I flew a couple of years ago and took an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth.
Artemis II, which should hopefully fly in April, will take 4 astronauts around the moon--the first time humans have been that far in space in 50+ years.
Artemis III was going to be a crewed moon landing, planned around 2028, but between delays in the lander development and the complexity of this mission, no one expected it to happen on time.
The major change that NASA has announced is to launch SLS more often--ideally once every 10 months. There are two major advantages to this:
1. More frequent launches will improve reliability because the team/engineers will understand the system better. There will be more commonality between launches.
2. With more launches before the end of the decade deadline there are more opportunities for intermediate milestones. In particular, Artemis III will turn into an Earth-orbit mission in which Orion will dock with one or both of the landers. This will test out the system before heading to the moon. Moreover, NASA plans to have at least two lunar landing attempts in 2028, which means that even if the first attempt is scrubbed, they will still have a chance to land before the end of the decade.
The difference in philosophy between NASA's current approach and SpaceX is quite stark. SpaceX has launched 11 Starships in the two and a bit years, with a lot of them blowing up. Where as Artemis is trying to get it near perfect on each run.
I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
(It seems that Artemis cost is $92B, where as SpaceX's Starship costs are less than $10B so far, give or take. So it seems that SpaceX is a more efficient approach.)
And don't compare costs because Starship does not and may never work so I dont care how much cheaper it is. If we are comparing fictional rockets I have a $1 rocket that can fly to Jupiter.
They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.
Every time you see a Starship launch what you aren't seeing is manufacturing processes corrected, issues in launch protocols and field issues resolved. All the little things that build up to make your system reliable. Do you want the doctor who has done a hundred successful surgeries, or the one who has done one or two but spent a long time in school watching videos.
The big difference is in the end, Starship gets built faster, costs much less, and can do more. It's not even close.
And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.
But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.
JPL would blow up a rocket every week, if the budget had room for it. Alas, we don't see that testing pace outside defense procurement.
NASA and SpaceX are fundamentally incomparable, considering how these two organizations are established and the motivations that drive all the actors within. Sure, NASA could start to adopt certain approaches but I don't imagine it to work in a way anyone else would imagine it to.
The question is whether you have the appetite for killing three astronauts on a test run like the Apollo team did.
EDIT: Fine, I’ll clarify. By “SpaceX like approach” I mean iterative design. By “more aggressive” I mean risk tolerance much greater than SpaceX to the degree that they do things that SpaceX wouldn’t do.
Calling it a "SpaceX like approach" and connecting to Apollo 1 is a neat trick, but SpaceX wouldn't (and doesn't) adopt that risky approach during manned flights.
It's all about "the right risk for the job." You can't be risky with human safety, but you also don't want to be overly timid and failure-averse during safely managed R&D tests, or your R&D grinds to a halt.
inexact quote: "You know, we're throwing towns into the sky" related to the early mishaps of R-7 program development, but they kept doing it. After that R-7 derivatives became the most reliable launch vehicle.
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resour...
I have not looked at the source (in Russian) for several years; now that I am curious I will check at home tonight. But as far as I remember "we are shooting towns into the sky" remark was not in reference to the R-7, but in reference to N1-L3, a hellishly expensive competitor to the Apollo manned Moon mission rocket. The meaning of the phrase was that each and every test should be taken extremely seriously as the cost of each flight is comparable to the cost of building a new city.
R-7 was developed much earlier when Korolev and his team at OKB-1 were iterating rapidly on much cheaper models that were primarily funded as rockets for strategic thermonuclear strike warheads. The civilian (Sputnik and later Gagarin) flights were an offshoot of that and were small enough that it happened as a side project. R-7 was a comparatively simple and cheap design, which may be why that family became a workhorse from the late 50s to carrying crews to the ISS. And the super expensive N1-L3 was a stillborn.
That's my recollection, need to recheck the sources.
Have to reread it too.
Still, while R-7 was initially funded as ballistic missile system, that was abandoned quite early, since it was very unwieldy, basically unusable.
Ballistic program in OKB-1 continued separately resulting in superchilled-LOX R-9.
N1 failure is attributed mostly to Korolev - Glushko rivalry that resulted in N1 lacking engines in time. It is widely belived that Kuznetsov bureau delivered just a bit too late - Korolev died, Moon race was lost and N1 project was literally buried.
EDIT: Mishin (OKB-1 head after Korolev) had no administrative push, and Glushko ended up heading it and building Energia-Buran. It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
That is a viable version. But I think this was one of the problems and there were plenty of others. While Chertok does point to the engines as a major problem, he also admits that the whole system became way too complex to succeed.
His description of electrical components (for which IIRC he was the chief engineer) and checkouts is telling. He also describes the feeling of "good envy" as the Russian engineers were listening in on comms between the Earth and the Apollo 13 during its mission. Which drove home the point of how much advantage US had, at least in electronic, and how powerful it was for its successful lunar program.
> It's all a sad story of unchecked emotions leading to monumental waste.
I have a softer view. Both Korolev and Glushko wanted their own leadership, which is normal. Korolev ran his shop in a dictatorial fashion, as that was the only way he could operate efficiently. Which is also fine and can produce spectacular results (and it did early on). But it comes with its own risks, including motivating strong leaders to branch out. I would not call it unchecked emotions that Glushko, after many years at OKB-1 went to run his own projects.
Living in a someone's shadow while under his dictatorial control is not for everyone. I can see the arguments for both sides. My 2c.
Sure it was complex for the electronics and some other aspect in the Soviet Union, but not by that much.
N1 actually flew and it mostly failed when engine outs and vibration started to cause other issues with piping and so on.
I think those are solvable problems. With engine reliability going up, whole system reliability would go up to. The piping issues and electronics issues were fixable in time.
Russia was on the right track. They had the right kinds of engines they needed. An engine that could also be used on smaller vehicles to have a shared family. Engines that could be restarted and tested.
They arguably should have started with a smaller rocket with those engines and only gone to N1 when they were reliable.
that would be such a culture change you'd have to disband NASA and start it over.
It's a risk-averse culture for a reason.
They push their test rockets to failure and learn from what goes wrong. That seems to be a pretty good process for getting a solid production rocket.
This seems so ridiculous in the abstract. Like, what is that exactly supposed to entail in the context of launching rockets?
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.
NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.
On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
All components go through several test campaigns on the ground, while iterating on the design to address issues. These campaigns take months/years. That's why changes are stacked into "blocks", which are the equivalent of rocket versions. Each block must be certified by the Air Force and NASA to be deemed worthy of flying their payloads.
So while you're right that SpaceX doesn't typically do this sort of thing, NASA did pay them to fly an untested nozzle design.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_COTS_Demo_Flight_1
2. See the section titled "Snipping the nozzle" at https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/forget-dragon-the-fa...
That is such an ignorant thing to say. You think Falcon 9 has had 500+ successful launches because they _think_ it will work?
The difference is that SpaceX is a private company that has the ability to iterate fast. NASA is a jobs program and Artemis/SLS a barrel of pork, simple as that.
SpaceX hasn't even had the confidence to put Starship in LEO yet, and has not carried 1kg of real payload (and barely a few kg of test payloads) - while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.
There's more to NASA than Artemis! NASA's robotic spaceflight programs generate extremely high science return at relatively low cost. Missions like Psyche, Europa Clipper, and Dragonfly are humanity's real explorers.
And their aeronautics work is valuable as well. Low-boom, etc.
If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?
And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?
I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.
SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing.
Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same.
Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad
Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?
However what people say and their real reasons aren't always the same.
I assume Issacman went around to everyone and convinced them to say they're all switching on the moon, add another test flight to delay things, and in return they'll switch to using Starship in the future as they will cancel Block 1B of Artemis
SpaceX's number of successful launches last year exceeded the total number of launches by all other U.S. agencies over the past decade.
I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.
But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.
Falcon-9 flies almost every other day, about 3 times per week. Methane is way more storable than hydrogen. Of course we'd like to compare numbers, but, given that Starship is way bigger than than N-1 stage - about 15 times, and there is the law of squares-cubes, which for our case says the bigger the tank the less percent of boiloff per unit of time, and it's methane, and we can afford to lose a little and top off with another tanker...
Now, how many tanker flights we'll need? That's a favorite riddle in Musk's plans :) . Korolyov, again, had some early ideas for 5 tankers - https://graphicsnickstevens.substack.com/p/sever-the-bridge-... ... For Starship - if you have 1500 tons of fuel in the Starship, and 150 tons of payload in a tanker, you need 10 flights. You can probably optimize, or be disadvantaged by some obstacles - so, 8-12 flights? That many can fly in less than a month. We can also use additional measures to reduce boiloff - better protection from the Sun, active cooling, maybe more permanent orbital refueling depot - but still, with our today's Falcon-9 flight rate we may consider one Starship per month refueled on LEO. Even if some refueling flights won't be successful, the replacements could be sent.
I personally suspect Starship will fly much more often than Falcon-9. We're so much better in rendezvous and docking these day than we were during Apollo flights, the reliability is so much higher - just take a look how many Falcon-9 flights in a row are successful - so I don't think operationally LEO refuelling will present a significant problem. And I'm sure we need maybe a couple of years to see first examples of that.
Space is hard, yes. But we're getting better, for sure.
In 1992 I watched a car parallel park itself in NYC on Today, on nbc before I went to school. My mind was reeling, automated car technology is right around the corner! That technology did not ship for 20 years.
It is easy to say we are getting better, that doesn’t mean we will see, in this case, starship fly in the near future. And while I have the utmost confidence in Gwynne Shotwell, I am not holding my breath that we see starship launch with any meaningful payload in this decade.
NASA is actually further ahead with space refuelling tech than SpaceX. But either way the tech is unlikely to work at scale this decade.
If only Starbase was located somewhere near abundant gas pipelines, within spitting distance of of the Texas Shale Oil boom…
If anyone can take "we need 14 launches per mission" and make it work, it's SpaceX.
Boil off isn't somehow unsolvable. We know cryogenics can work in space, and SpaceX's approach is actually less aggressive than Blue Origin's requirement of zero boil off on LH2.
People who defend SLS on the bases that Starship isn't good don't get it. It doesn't matter if Starship exists. SLS should have been canceled even if you assume the state of the rocket industry in 2015.
Anybody with half a brain and 3h time to do analysis on the topic could figure this out.
Starship is important because the closer Starship gets to coming online the more obviously wrong that line of thought is.
As is, Starship, with its first stage being online and reusable already says "we could have done something like SLS much cheaper if we were smart about it". When the second stage comes fully online, the argument for SLS will diminish further.
If you never invested in anything else, then the M4 Sherman tank would still be the best tank. And then you could say 'we can't get anything better' and continue to use it while refusing to ever even put 1$ into developing anything else.
And actually there are plenty of ways, even without Starship to do these things differently.
I remember when SLS fans in 2016 told me that SLS is real and Falcon Heavy is fake. Even when Falcon Heavy and now New Gleen can do most things SLS can.
One NASA Administer was almost fired for exploring if Orion could launch on Falcon Heavy.
The thing is NASA is not looking for alternatives, and it doesn't matter if Starship is fully proven and operational. People will still say its not the same, because Starship will need refuel and isn't direct.
You can always find a reason to justify one solution if you only ever consider that solution and refuse to even look at any other possibility.
I want Starship to be a success and reduce the cost to orbit and beyond, but past success does not in any way guarantee future success.
The SLS has already proven it can fly to lunar orbit and back on one single launch. In contrast, even if everything goes according to plan, Starship requires at least a dozen re-fueling flights while it hangs in orbit around the Earth to be able to then fly to the Moon.
Will one Starship launch, when it eventually works, be cheaper than SLS? Very likely. Will 12+ Starship launches + the time in orbit be cheaper than a single SLS launch? Much, much less likely.
It's also worth noting that a captured booster has only once been successfully flown again - and certainly not in the kind of tight time line that the in-orbit refueling operation requires (first flight was March 6, second flight was October 13 - and no more flights are planned anyway). There is currently little proof that boosters can be "rapidly and fully reused" as needed to match any of the cost promises.
The Chinese are basically going to launch a few astronauts up there with a modern Saturn 5. But for them that would be a success because it is their first time.
You only get to land on the moon once before people stop giving a shit.
Depends on what happens once on the moon. If all you do is send 2 people at a time to collect rocks, then it does get boring to the general public. If each landing assembles the next section of a moon habitat, then I think the interest sticks around longer.
It's the next step of progress. Did you suddenly become bored because you learned to walk after crawling? Sounds kind of like you did to me.
If America (or China) says the best spots on the moon belong to America (or China), suddenly it's Space Race 2.0 and everyone cares.
This is what will happen once any building actually starts happening.
To OP's point, Artemis has cost $92 billion over 14 years. This has produced exactly one launch.
It's hard to put an exact timeline on Starship since a lot of its development overlaps with Falcon 9 using the same components, but it's inarguable that it has cost one tenth Artemis so far.
I agree that Starship has been plagued by delays and the capabilities are so far mostly just talk. However, it has flown a number of times, and I would be willing to make a strong bet that it will orbit the moon with real payload long before it catches up to Artemis in budget.
You're arguing with the same intellectual honestly of someone saying Starship is 11x better because it has left the ground 11x more times.
lol what? They've caught and successfully reflown the super heavy booster, and they've mostly successfully done a soft landing of Starship in the sea. How is that remotely "just talk"?
Yes they've reflown a caught rocket, and they've soft landed in the ocean. I can do those things with a paper airplane.
It is simultaneously true that Starship's capabilities are on track, and are at this moment just talk. I would bet that Starship will deliver within 10% of claimed specs, before 2030. But none of those have currently been proven.
Not to mention that SpaceX got funding in like 2021, and SLS in 2011.
And SLS works, then why can it only launch every couple of years. I mean what good is a rocket that is so hard to produce that the whole politics and everything around it changes between launches. They basically have to teach a whole new group of people about SLS for each launch.
> while SLS did an orbit of the Moon, with real payload satellites.
If you want things launched to the moon, SpaceX, BlueOrigin or ULA could have done that many times every year for the last 15 years just as well.
Starship isn't just another 'look we can launch some stuff to the moon', its much more, and therefore much more difficult.
You are praising SLS for doing the very, very, very minimum that it should have been doing since 2017. And it will do it at most 3 times until 2027.
That said, I think Starship architecture can be useful even if this issue is not fully solved.
Starship can be much, much cheaper then SLS even if they throw away the upper stage.
NASA absolutely should learn from SpaceX, they were the company that liberated US astronaut's access to space from Russian rockets after NASA had lost that capability. And they have brought down the cost of payload to orbit enormously, and they have been finding viable commercial non-government markets for space. They've been launching around 90% of global mass to orbit. An order of magnitude more than all other corporations and governments in the world combined.
All other serious commercial space companies have taken lessons from SpaceX, so has the Chinese space program. To suggest NASA should not learn from SpaceX is just astounding. That's the kind of think you'd only hear from western government bureaucrats.
And mind you, SLS isn't a new system. It's old space shuttle engines. It's old solid rocket boosters that were extended by a segment. So, it should be cheap and fast?
I think the point here is really that SLS should be a walk in the park. Mostly old tech, reused with not a lot of innovation.
Starship might not have put a real payload into orbit yet but it has already delivered vastly superior engine technology (full flow staged combustion), a new way to land rocket boosters to allow for reuse and many more smaller things.
If you're going to innovate, things will not be smooth because you're learning things. You should be celebrating those achievements, especially as it didn't cost you a dime
One could also ask "how many times has the SLS booster landed and been reused?". This would be a silly question to ask, because SLS is not trying to reuse the booster.
The risk profile is very different.
Which mission are you referring to?
If it's STS-1, AFAIK there were no close call incidents during the actual flight, but the mission commander, John Young, did have to veto a suggestion to make that mission an RTLS abort instead of an actual orbital flight. Doing that would have been reckless, yes: Young's reason for not doing it was "Let's not practice Russian roulette."
One thing I wonder about is whether it would have been possible to test the flap while in orbit, to see if the hydraulic lines were actually ruptured or not.
Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
Should such testing have been needed? No.
Was such testing needed, given NASA's political pressures and management? Maybe. Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore than "the hypothesizing of those worrywart engineers," and might've provided the necessary ammunition to resist said political pressures.
The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.
Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.
In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.
That doesn't follow. If those were unmanned test flights pushing the vehicle limits you can't just assume they would have gone as they actually did.
As far as the launch to orbit, which was the flight phase when Challenger was lost, every Shuttle flight pushed the vehicle to its limits. That was unavoidable. There was no way to do a launch that was any more stressful than the actual launches were.
Note also my comments there about other SRB designs that were known well before the Shuttle and the range of temperatures they could launch in. Those designs were used on many unmanned flights for years before the Shuttle was even designed. So in this respect, the unmanned test work had already been done. The Shuttle designers just refused to take advantage of all that knowledge for braindead political reasons.
> I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible
Valid.
Were not necessary to show problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There had been previous problems noted on flights at temperatures up to 75 degrees F. And the Thiokol engineers had test stand data showing that the O-rings were not fully sealing the joint even at 100 degrees F. Any rational assessment of the data would have concluded that the joint was unacceptably risky at any temperature.
It might have been true that a flight at 29 degrees F (the estimated O-ring temperature at the Challenger launch) was a little more unacceptably risky than a flight at a higher temperature. But that was actually a relatively minor point. The reason the Thiokol engineers focused on the low temperature the night before the Challenger launch was not because they had a solid case, or even a reasonable suspicion, that launching at that cold a temperature was too risky as compared with launching at higher temperatures. It was because NASA had already ignored much better arguments that they had advanced previously, and they were trying to find something, anything, to get NASA to stop at least some launches, given that they knew NASA was not going to stop all launches for political reasons.
And just to round off this issue, other SRB joint designs have been well known since, I believe, the 1960s, that do not have the issue the Shuttle SRBs had, and can be launched just fine at temperatures much colder than 29 F (for example, a launch from Siberia in the winter). So it's not even the case that SRB launches at such cold temperatures were unknown or not well understood prior to the Challenger launch. The Shuttle design simply was braindead in this respect (for political reasons).
Columbia would not have been lost if the Shuttle was top stacked, instead of side stacked.
Challenger would not have been lost if not for the use of solid rockets to launch humans.
Both of these design decisions were done to reduce development effort.
No, I'm not wrong. We're both right. Yes, the original decisions on the Shuttle design were braindead. But even given that, the decisions to ignore clear red flags from Shuttle missions were also braindead.
They sacrificed what worked for potential, but tried to take far to big of a step.
I would argue, if you design something that has so many potential pitfalls and so many operational constraints, and so many drivers that make it incredibly expensive and slow, it is understandable why they started overlooking red flags. They would have barley ever lunched at all if they had not overlooked red flags.
NASA/Congress pushes the armchair quarterback approach. Analyze forever, fail because analysis isn't the same thing as real world experience, get stuck using 50 year old rocket technology. Each engine on SLS cost more than the entire Starship super heavy launch vehicle.
By weight the RS-25 engines cost about 70% of that of building their 7000lb mass dry mass out of gold. That's insane.
The current Starship launches are part of a development and testing program. They expect quite a few failures (though probably not as many as they've experienced). But since each Starship launch is only 1/25th the cost of an SLS launch, SpaceX can afford to blow up a lot of them. And they won't put people on them until they have a track record of safe operation. Falcon 9 didn't have crew on it until the 85th launch.
1. The number of landing attempts is higher than the number of launches because Falcon Heavy results in multiple landings per launch.
They should not adopt spacex practices, they should adopt spacex lift vehicles (once proven).
Regardless, first thing it reminded me of was that interview quote about how if nasa had SpaceX track record they would have lost funding long ago. Is there a US political landscape, even back to 2008-2016, where that isn't the case?
I have no skin in this game other than to say the old school methods resulted in a janky ship that stranded two astronauts in space for months until they could catch a ride home on a SpaceX ship.
What SLS currently has achieved had been achieved by Falcons and Dragons years ago, only way more cheaply and successfully.
No matter what we may think about Mr Musk, SLS is dead end.
They still need to show they can reliably relight the engines to deorbit. They're actually very good citizens there. Prove you can deorbit before putting anything in orbit
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
If we're putting humans into rockets into space, I'd like to think we adopt a balanced approach.
NASA has done some analysis on early SpaceX and shown that their methods produced a 10x improvement in cost. And that was with the method NASA uses that often turn out to be wrong.
And it works because we all know that repetition and practice are, in fact, important. So it feels believable that having people just repeat something over and over is the answer.
Similarly, people can be swayed by the master coming in and producing a single artifact that blows away everyone. You see this archetype story as often as the student that learns by just repeating a motion over and over. (Indeed.... this is literally the Karate Kid plot...)
The truth is far more mundane. Yes, you have to repeat things. But also yes, you have to give thought to what you are doing. This is why actual art classes aren't just "lets build things", but also "lets learn how to critique things that you build."
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/04/f-scott-fitzgera...
The parent's anecdote claimed that quantity led to quality, when objectively speaking it does not in the real world. I could have alternatively used Ali Baba as an example of what quantity gets you.
The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.
They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.
It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.
All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
correction: there are 16 RS25's left, but production has begun on more for the Artemis V mission. However, production is slow so they can't just yeet SLS's into space and test rapidly.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
My understanding is the difference is politics. The US political system is dysfunctional, and so riven by anti-government factions, that there's too much pressure to not fail.
If NASA tried the SpaceX approach, after the second rocket blew up NASA's administrator would have been hauled in front of Congress and interrogated over the "waste of taxpayer money" and then the program may get canceled.
The ability to pick a small-but-well-defined goal as an interim milestone - and stay focused on it - is a key skill, and too often I've seen waterfall-like companies slowly scope-creep their first MVP until it's a lumbering mess. You almost always need someone with a strong personality to push team to 'get it done', and that level of ownership is really hard to come by in an organization historically built around ass-covering.
I think Commercial Crew is the right model for NASA. Pick the design objectives, provide some level of scaffolding regulation (i.e loss-of-crew calculations), and then contract out to private sector to actually 'get it done'. (Yes Starliner was a failure, but Dragon is definitely a success. A 50% hit rate and success of the program overall is better than Artemis)
NASA's approach to space exploration remains incredibly successful. Look at all the missions operating all over our solar system, including on Mars' surface, and beyond. No other organization comes close.
> I wonder which approach is more capital efficient? Which is more time efficient?
How we frame the debate - if you like, the specs that define the rfp - determines the outcome. You define it by efficiency, which is what businesses prioritize and is SpaceX's strength. They take a well-established technology, orbital launch, and make it much more efficient.
NASA prioritizes ground-breaking (space-breaking?), history-making exploration and technology - things never done before and often hardly dreamed of by most people. That can take time and money but they deliver at a very high rate - think of how many missions have failed, compared to recent private missions, such as moon missions, and even those of other space agencies.
What exactly is ground breaking about SLS and not quite getting back to the moon with it?
I don't understand the second part: NASA doesn't do groundbreaking work, because you found one project, in progress, that hasn't broken new ground yet?
That only works if the unit cost is low. A single SLS rocket engine costs about the same as an entire starship launch including 39 engines.
I suspect that Starship will never get a human rating
Most of the delays in Artemis are not around the launch system but the spacecraft and lander and life support and associated systems.
Not saying it couldn't be done more efficiently, but comparing Artemis to SpaceX is apples and oranges. The SLS is old expensive disposable rocket tech but it's also solid and tested and we pretty much know it will work. It's not the problem.
So how did we do it in the 60s? With a blank check and luck. The insane accomplishment of Apollo wasn't just landing people on the moon but doing it without killing anyone. The fact that nobody died on those flights is incredible, and luck was certainly a factor. We very nearly lost a crew on 13. If we'd kept flying Apollo rigs we'd have lost people. That whole mission was way ahead of its time technologically and generally unsustainable. It was an early proof of concept.
They learned a few lessons, but then 1986 they let “getting things perfect” slip a bit more. It’s happened a few times since.
Personally, I’d rather not lose any more astronauts.
That’s because, unlike NASA, they don’t risk crew with untested systems and first time flights.
I don't. I wonder whether US astronauts are going to die on the surface of the moon while the world watches in 4K. I believe, to my great relief, that by some minor miracle, we've ended up with a NASA administrator that is wondering the same thing, and also has the temerity to make some really hard calls, despite what is doubtless an enormous amount of pressure. I've been analyzing his words and speech. There is just no bullshit in him, and he clearly doesn't suffer fools. You can see it. He's like something out of SAC from the Cold War.
NASA is in desperate need of exactly that. Perhaps that's not the correct, permanent disposition for all things at all times, but if the US and NASA are actually going to engage in another Space Race, this time with China, we very much need it at this time.
> I wonder if NASA could start to adopt SpaceX like approaches? Where one doesn't try to get everything correct before acting?
Move fast and break things has its place, but when putting humans in things you should be very concerned about... you know... not killing them...
The reason NASA does things this way is because they essentially have one shot. Failure is not an option. When they fail, funding gets pulled and you don't get to try again. NASA doesn't get to launch 11 and have half of them fail. This puts a weird spin on things because in many industries you have the saying "why is there always time to do it twice but never to do it right" but NASA (and plenty of other sectors) have the reverse "there's always more time to do it right, but never time to do it twice".
Truthfully, the optimal path is somewhere in between, but what is optimal is highly dependent on many different environmental factors. For example, when there are humans on board, well... you don't have the luxury of doing it twice. When those people are gone, they're gone. But when unmanned, well... early NASA also blew up a bunch of shit while it was figuring things out and had a much less regulated budget. Move fast and break things is a great strategy when you're starting and still needing to figure things out. But also when things become successful and working, people in charge look less fondly on mistakes. Doesn't matter if it is reasonable (e.g. human lives should be protected) or more unreasonable (you can't make dinner without getting the dishes dirty).
What I'm saying here is when SpaceX gets successful they'll shift gears too. Did we not see the same evolution in every big tech company? Seems to happen in every business and what is the government if not a giant organization? It really seems like as companies get larger and more powerful they start to look much more like governments.
We came in peace for all mankind...more of that would be nice.
And if you don’t think landing and reuse of F9 first the isn’t exciting, I don’t think your priorities are right.
Just like the way privatizing utilities companies had led to much lower energy / water ? These people aren't working for free...
NASA programs today are mainly about creating/maintaining jobs and keeping private industry contractors busy. They lost the political agency and freedom to move fast that they had in the 60s.
Their explorer robotics are interesting, something I would be proud to work on; but a pretty different nitch.
So NASA is not drawing from the best people anymore.
NASA doesn't develop or build lots of technology that has become mature enough that private industry can take it on and NASA can focus on the past-the-bleeding-edge stuff.
Reality? Outside of JPL the talent level at Nasa is frankly very poor. You really want to claim that the current version of Nasa could pull off the Apollo program today?
back then TVs weren't that popular and those that had one were stuck with very low definition video, today our 2k and 4k screens would be able to spot their flaws easily
Launch cadence across NASA programs:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456699175497741
An infographic showing the new architectures:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2027456713507356713
It's interesting how Artemis III (the new one) will try to prove out both HLS landers in one LEO mission.
If you've never seen a gator then looking in the ditches by the road during the bus tour is a good bed.
(I don't know what the current policies are but you used to be able to apply in advance for VIP tickets, or buy them on the secondary market, which gives you much closer viewing of the launch)
We unanimously agreed KSC was by far the best of all. If you only do one thing in Florida, that would be it.
Godspeed to them, hopefully I'm being overly dour.
That's irresponsbility and incompentence in any position, especially at that level of management.
> true
I don't believe you can know that. Saying it with assurance - by Internet randos or by the NASA administrator - is more a signal of a lack of analysis. Other people aren't idiots and complex technology issues aren't that certain - those are self-serving fairy tales.
Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program
Then you had Challenger, when experts were not listened to, and people died when they shouldn't have.
I don't understand the hostility.
Is that true? The US has far more money to spend now, in real dollars.
> didn’t have to fight congresspeople and the aerospace giants lobbying them
Is that true? I doubt it. Big budget programs then probably were no different, though with fewer transparency and anti-corruption laws and rules.
Do you want to provide your specific insights into the announcement in the post?
But even assuming we do view it as a deadline, the Apollo 1 losses are a pretty good argument that maybe we shouldn't repeat that.
Politicians have pressured NASA for launches previously and it has killed astronauts.
Artemis II is a disaster in progress.
SpaceX is on a fixed price contract. Dragging the project along is literally costing them money.
By literally any analysis you can do, you will see that in the last 15 years SpaceX was by far and away (its not close) the best contractor to NASA in terms of delivering what NASA wanted.
In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.
>In fact, by far and away the project that have done the worst, are the project NASA does in the old style where they remain the main designers and operate and only work with private companies as builders. That's exactly why SLS is such a shit-show.
How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?
The milestones and options are all defined in the original contract and each milestone is assigned some monetary value. There were a set of extension option that add milestones for a second lander that NASA choice to pick up. All this was specified in the original contract.
Starship won one small additional contract that I know of, that was about liquid transfer in Orbit, but that just one of 20+ minor contract about space operations.
> no matter what happens to the mission (it'll probably fail), Elon and his buddies will still get to scrape a couple hundred million for themselves
If it fails SpaceX will not get the money covered in the milestones. So if it fails it will 100% be SpaceX that pays. Why are you making stuff up?
Also, SpaceX has been the most successful NASA contractor in the last 20 years and its not even remotely close, so your confident that it fails is just bias.
NASA own estimation is that the SpaceX lunar program will cost more then double what they are paying SpaceX. SpaceX is giving the government an absolutely insanely good ideal and building a lunar lander for like 1/10 of the cost the lunar lander estimates were during constellation. SpaceX will be LOSING MONEY ON THIS DEAL.
Same goes for BlueOrigin, they can only bid because its Bezos hobby project, they will not make money from the lunar lander anytime soon.
All the contracts are public, if there are contracts that SpaceX got for Starship beyond the original lander contract and the minor demonstrator contract I mention above, please link them.
> Funnily enough, the person who decided to grant SpaceX this contract, Kathy Lueders, did so and then immediately decided to quit NASA and work for SpaceX. Nothing to see there.
Kathy Lueders has fantastic reputation with everybody in the know and has worker for NASA for 20 years. Its also wrong to say that it was just her, there is a whole team doing the evaluation with lots of experts involved.And after her the report had to be approved by a whole bunch more people.
If you have any actual evidence of wrong-doing, please come forward.
Funny enough Boeing did actually get caught cheating, a NASA executive was actually fired because he was giving Boeing details about the contract and giving them chances to re-submit the bid.
In terms of the technical evaluation see:
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/option-a-sou...
And the GAO about why the protests were rejected:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/b-419783.pdf
BlueOrigin's 'National Team' and SpaceX received the same technical evaluation level while SpaceX was only like 50% of the price.
There is really no question that it was the only sensible selection. Anybody would have done the same selection. In fact had Kathy Lueders not selected SpaceX she might have been fired for bias and wrong doing.
It was then followed up by lobbying on the side of BlueOrigin where they got their senator from Washington involved and forced an increase in budget so they could also participate, but they were forced to lower the price by a huge amount as well.
So the result is NASA gets two lander program for about 1/4 or cheaper then was expected 20 years ago during Constellation.
If that's not an amazing deal I don't know what is.
> How could SLS, a rocket that literally worked the first time, be worse than Starship, a rocket that does not work?
Its so crystal clear that you don't know anything about rockets and you're only goal is to perpetuate anti-SpaceX hate.
SLS 'first' flight is literally 95% things that already existed, doing something very conventional. It is literally using engines that were built in the 1970s. And its using solid state boosters form the same factory as those of Shuttle. Its literally just a bunch of old parts in slightly different configuration.
And its already cost 50 billion $ in development without even having to design anything new. The launch cost are absurdly high, so high that NASA can barley fund a SLS any anything else at the time. Notice how during Constellation they never even started to build a Lander, they never had the budget for it.
Starship on the other hand is a completely new architecture, with brand new engine, brand new infrastructure, brand new manufacturing sites and so on. And its trying to do much more then SLS. Its trying to be reusable and support distributed launch, and be a lander.
If all NASA wants is a simply rocket that can launch stuff, then SLS shouldn't be compared with Starship at all. SLS is more like Falcon Heavy or New Glenn, just 10-50x more expensive. Notice how Falcon Heavy also worked the first time it flew, because it was just parts of existing rockets in a new configuration. Its almost like its easier if you build with components that have flight heritage. Crazy how that works.
If NASA wanted just a simple big rocket they could have gotten there much cheaper then SLS. So the whole SLS vs Starship comparison doesn't even make any fucking sense in the first place. The goal of Starship was never to be SLS. Falcon Heavy is already 90% of SLS and if NASA had wanted to, they could have paid SpaceX to boost its performance a bit (something that had been studied 15 years ago already). And now between Vulcan, Falcon, New Glenn there are plenty of options if all you want is launch.
Honestly what kind of idiotic engineering evaluation is it to say 'X worked first time' so its forever better then anything else that didn't work the first time. That's not how we evaluate engineering projects ever even if you were comparing the right things in the first place. This argument just proves that you are not seriously trying to engage with the issues of Artemis program.
Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
I mean does it sound like that was faster then what we can do today?
And their testing procedures were actually very high quality. You don't just accidentally land on the moon and return. That doesn't just happen 'somehow'. That is truly idiotic level analysis.
> Each F1 rocket engine was hand tuned by drilling holes into the "plate" so it would not cause the combustion mixture to vibrate the engine into smithereens.
And that this works was established with lots of both experimental testing and lots of theoretical work.
So much so that F1 is one of the most reliable engines ever used in space flight history.
> Such an approach would never be tolerated today by NASA.
Except of course that the RS-25 engine used by NASA today is known to be less safe then F-1. Having had more failures and generally causing more minor operational problems.
It seems you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. In fact, NASA own analysis before they were forced to pick SLS by congress indicated that a updated version of F-1 (still relying on the analysis of those people in the 1960s) would be a much better rocket.
Apollo worked because engineers from the top to the bottom made smart engineering focused decisions taking responsibility for their part of the stack, and close working together in teams on a shared goal while having very solid testing procedures for everything.
The reason modern projects take so long is that so many of them are stuck in design or awaiting funding stage for what feels like interminable ages; once the construction phase starts, they tend to go fairly quickly. But if you look at projects 100 years ago, well, they also seem to have fairly lengthy pre-construction timelines. It's just that we conveniently forget about those when we look back on them nowadays.
Some regs are worth it, certainly, but being overly cautious is in itself unsafe.
The historical comparisons are complete BS: they wind up at "if we sacrifice enough people to the industrial god he will reward us" rather then discussing anything real.
"It's regulations" "it's nimbyism" "it's environmental studies".
Concepts. Not the real actual implementations, their stakeholders and their impact on the project.
[0]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-12/golden-g...
How many lives would have been saved if a bridge for trains instead of cars were designed?
Artemis objectives are less well defined, more ambitious and with way less money. The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor. The difference in importance between the two is the cause of all the failures.
I think that's probably important framing for how things were reported back then. But also, I'm wrong like 99.9999999% of the time. So!
On avg NASA budget was about the same as now. But now we do more things now. But between Constellation/SLS and Orion this new Shuttle based architecture has as much money as Apollo while having done almost non of it. Before it is where Apollo ended up, it will cost much, much more then Apollo.
But even if what you said was true, a gigantic amount of infrastructure that was paid for in the 1960s is still in use today. A huge amount of fundamental research that was required is already done. That alone should make it much cheaper.
Same goes for development, Artemis is not developing any new engines, while Apollo had to develop many new engines.
> The big budget is being allocated to brutes killing people in the streets and a decadent ballroom for the emperor.
Except of course that Korea/Vietnam were much more expensive then what were are doing now.
I spent some time trying to get solid numbers because I was actually interested in this.
Inflation-adjusted averages:
Apollo-era NASA average (FY1961–FY1972): ~$44.2B/year (2024 dollars)
NASA average over the last ~20 years: ~$25B/year (2024 dollars)
So over FY1961–FY1972 (12 years), that’s roughly $44.2B × 12 ≈ $530B in today’s money for all of NASA.
And what did that buy?
A NASA that was basically inventing the modern space industry:
- building launch sites (LC-39 etc.)
- building huge test facilities and stands
- building control centers / mission operations
- building manufacturing capability at scale
- building/expanding NASA centers
- building DSN and deep-space comms infrastructure
- massive amounts of fundamental research and basic engineering research
- building multiple human spacecraft programs (Mercury → Gemini → Apollo)
- developing major new engines (F-1, J-2, and a bunch of others)
- building multiple rockets and variants
and flying tons of missions, including 6 Moon landings
But of course, NASA wasn’t only Apollo. Even though Apollo dominated, NASA also did a bunch of major non-lunar work: Mariner, Orbiting Solar Observatory, Echo / Telstar / Relay / Syncom, X-15, and the beginnings of Skylab, etc.
A good summary is here: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
That article’s Apollo-only number is around $257B (in 2020 dollars) depending on what you include. I used 2024 $ above for budget. But its close.
Now compare to Constellation and its children (Orion + SLS).
A fair estimate for the cost to get to where we are today is around ~$90B (not counting suits or the SpaceX / Blue Origin landers). And what did we get for that? So far, a few test very incomplete flights.
Artemis/SLS is not doing Apollo-style clean-sheet propulsion development. It mostly reuses Shuttle-era propulsion (RS-25 + solids) with restarts/updates, rather than developing new engines like Apollo had to.
Looking forward gets fuzzier, but current projections suggest roughly:
~$20–25B more before the first crewed lunar landing (assuming the schedule doesn’t slip again)
then for five more landings, under optimistic “one per year” cadence assumptions, maybe another ~$30B or so
So you end up around ~$150B total if everything goes right from here. And note: this assumes huge savings because SpaceX and Blue Origin are spending lots of their own money rather than NASA building its own lander in the Apollo style.
So very roughly:
~$150B (Constellation → SLS/Orion → first 6 landings, optimistic) vs
~$250B-ish (Apollo-only, depending on inclusion choices and dollar basis)
And my basic point still stands: Apollo had to build the ecosystem, the infrastructure, and the foundational research base from scratch. A gigantic amount of that 1960s infrastructure is still in use today, and 60+ years of engineering and technology progress should matter. That alone should be worth well over $100B in “things you don’t need to reinvent.”
In pure execution terms, it’s hard to argue Apollo wasn’t on a totally different level.
My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.
SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.
So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that. The reason is that nobody cares about going to the moon. That shows in fuzzy requirements and much less money for it.
BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.
I would say by my own data Apollo has to do 800% more work given the point on where it started.
> My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.
This isn't true. The Apollo program had many more objectives and was continuing and was about to do many more things. The politics around it just changed.
If it was a single goal, then they could have stopped after Apollo 11.
And of course after moon landings stopped, Skylab and other post-Apollo programs continued. Much of the Apollo hardware continued to operate for quite a while longer.
> SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.
Yeah but those changes in plan don't actually change the hardware of the rocket itself. Its always the exact same rocket. It just gets new mission that are designed to work for it, not the other way around. So you can't really say SLS/Orion was delayed because of chaining requirements.
> So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that.
The very fact that the requirements are fuzzy and the political process is a shit-show that gets nothing done and provides bad intensive is exactly the civilization level failure. Just as much as when you try to land on the moon or build a high speed rail line.
> BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.
NASA and government is pretty good on this and lots of people have done work on this, specially Casey at the Planetary Society. So I do not deserve all that much credit.
And for SLS I have been following the program for 10+ years and have been arguing since 2015 that the only rational plan is canceling it. But the congressional alliance behind it is just incredible.
But there's no lack of huge achievements. The Mars rovers are amazing: super-sonic parachutes, retro rockets, deploying a little helicopter with no real-time control is huge. So is planting JWST at the L2 point and unfolding it a million miles from earth.
Also, the NASA budget in the 1960's was 10 times higher.
If you look at the unmanned side of NASA, that's going great. NASA can get amazing stuff done.
The manned side gets political attention, and the nature of current politics makes it a bad kind of attention. Results are essentially irrelevant. Jobs and cronyism are the point.
The overall design of the Space Launch System makes very little sense. We know all too well that solid rockets are a bad idea for crewed spaceflight. Hydrogen is a bad fuel for a first stage. It's horrendously wasteful to use expensive, complicated engines designed to be reused, and then throw them away on every launch. Early estimates were over $2 billion per launch, which in the current age is total clownshoes. The actual costs will be much higher still.
So why are they doing it? Because using all this old, rather inappropriate tech allows them to keep paying the contractors for it. If you gave NASA a pile of money and told them to build a moon program, they wouldn't build this. But it's not their choice.
I don't understand. NASA says they goal of landing on the moon in 2028 is not realistic.
They are adding a launch in 2027 to do more testing.
Great.
It will be followed by one possibly two lunar landings in 2028. Are the now 2028 landings primarily testing SpaceX integration?
The Artemis rockets are huge, and extremely expensive. And the build time is considerable.
Now they are planning 3 rockets in two years, each of which is not reusable?
Then they have to build those in parallel, which makes sense but incorporating wha you learn in 2027, into rockets you have already nearly finished seems an odd approach
Explaining Why NASA's Starliner Report Is So Bad > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L96asfTvJ_A
2-years ago he presented concerns to NASA.
Destin analysis is ok and he makes a number of good points, but it very pro-Alabama (Mafia) inside NASA and contractors since he very clearly is influence by the strong Albama presence and those are the parts of the industry he interacts with.
So Destin misses a huge amount of the relevant puzzle pieces, or he simply doesn't talk about them.
He also simple makes a few assumptions that are fundamentally wrong, namely the different targets of the program. The goal was never to repeat Apollo and landing a few people a few times is totally different from the original goals of Artemis.
Constellation was a bad program by Bush Jr that was aimed at the moon, it would have been 4 expensive project, a human rocket, a big cargo rocket, a earth-moon capsule and a big new moon lander. Most of it Shuttle based, because everybody knew Shuttle was going to die, but they wanted to keep the workforce. Of these the human rocket was one of the dumbest human rocket designs ever, and it was so absurdly hilariously over-budget that the program basically had to kill itself. Orion was being worked on but was also over-budget and behind. The never even got to the big rocket or the moon lander.
Obama and his space team had some better idea, namely using commercial rockets and new contracting structures. You only need normal commercial rocket if you simply invest in distributed launch. Any analysis shows that this was going to be cheaper but NASA was never allowed to explore that. So they wanted to cancel the incredibly expensive badly designed Constellation program and did so. But Congress, Republicans and Democrats lead by later NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Alabama-man Richard Shelby wouldn't let it happen, they saved Orion by giving it a mission it was not suited for and transformed the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rocket from Constellation (the horribly over budget complete shit-shows) into SLS.
The way this happen is funny. NASA did a bunch of analysis on different very big rocket. And NASA analysis was perfectly clear, the cheapest and long term best option would be a RP-1 fueled first stage with big engines. So basically a Saturn V modernized. So basically going away from Shuttle legacy (Of course commercial rockets and distrusted launch would have been even cheaper, but they were not allowed to investigate that). Commercial companies were also never asked for suggestion, despite both SpaceX and ULA offering.
Congress lead by Richard Shelby and friends wouldn't allow that. So they specifically wrote the bill in a way that made it absolutely impossible to do anything other then a Shuttle derived. They wrote in 2010-2011 that the a rocket with 70t to LEO had to launch by 2017 and then later be upgraded to much more then that. And that made it clear no engine other then already existing RS-25 and the Shuttle Solid boosters could work.
But of course, Constellation was dead, SLS was literally just a rocket that didn't have a mission. Literally non, it had no uses. So Obama space team just came up with some mission that didn't really made sense, but at least they could pretend in marketing material that SLS was anything other then job creation.
Of course the program has just continue to done badly and done all the things anybody with a brain could have predicted already in 2012. Its incredibly expensive legacy hardware. Every aspect of the design makes it not only expensive but also incredibly hard and slow to produce. Every aspect of it makes it hard to operate.
SLS had the best possible budget, often getting more money in the Budget then they even asked for. It has been the darling of congress. SpaceX is delayed, and there are congressional hearings and questions. Tons of paid for media and so on. SLS that consumes more money per year then SpaceX received for the whole moon-lander barley gets mentioned. Under Trump 1 Bridenstein tried to launch an investigation if Orion could be launched on anything other then SLS. This was a pretty bad idea, likely mostly don't to pressure Boeing. Shelby basically told him that he would have to resign if he continued investigating this.
Jared Isaacman just like all the NASA Administrators before him know that this program is incredibly stupidly designed. Its program designed around a bunch of legacy hardware. And really dumb requirement. Really dumb contracting structure. And so on.
Isaacman is at least trying to contain how much money gets drained into the SLS money-pit, by dropping the also late and also over-budget EUS upper stage. This stage would likely have been just another endless money pit inside the money pit. And instead they might get away with a somewhat smaller money pit.
All of this is just an embarrassing shit-show from beginning to end. Between Shuttle derived vehicles and Orion NASA has spent already something on the order of 100-150 billion $ and what they got out of it was 1 SLS launch and a few Orion tests that never tested the whole system. Its going to cost much more and its not gone get much cheaper anytime soon. On the meantime, the complete development of Falcon 1, Falcon 9, re-usability and human rating Falcon 9 plus Falcon Heavy, plus Cargo Dragon 1, Cargo Dragon 2 and Crew Dragon cost on the order of 5 billion $ conservatively.
And I'm not saying this as a SpaceX believer who wants all money to go to SpaceX. Distrusted launch (including refueling) where many companies can compete is the right answer specially for launch.