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from the spending-these-dollars-makes-sense dept.
In-depth study: Commercial cargo program a bargain for NASA
It has generally been assumed that NASA will save money by spurring the development of services by US companies to supply the International Space Station, but such conclusions have largely been based on estimates. Now, a rigorous new review authored by a NASA analyst, and published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, offers a clear answer to this question.
According to the new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, the supply services offered by SpaceX and Orbital ATK have cost NASA two to three times less than if the space agency had continued to fly the space shuttle. For his analysis, Zapata attempted to make an "apples to apples" comparison between the commercial vehicles, through June 2017, and the space shuttle.
Specifically, the analysis of development and operational expenses, as well as vehicle failures, found that SpaceX had cost NASA about $89,000 per kg of cargo delivered to the space station. By the same methodology, he found Orbital ATK had cost $135,000 per kg. Had the shuttle continued to fly, and deliver cargo via its Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, it would have cost $272,000 per kg.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 14 2017, @03:51PM
Massively expensive. It's just the way they operate. For example, with what they spent on the Space Launch System over the past 8 years, they could pay for many dozens of launches on commercial launch vehicles.
A huge thing that gets missed with these comparisons is that commercial launch providers have lower costs in the first place - they just spend less, and higher launch frequency since their launch vehicles routinely get used for non-NASA purposes. That means further substantial cost reduction and higher reliability.
Here's an example of the NASA game. It's not entirely clear how we would have constructed the ISS, but it would have been vastly cheaper without funding ten to twenty years of the Space Shuttle ($30 to $60 billion roughly), but the Shuttle was not required for orbital construction, sorry. Nor was it required for putting crew in space.
The exercise certainly was not worth the cost, because we could have done the same for vastly less and thus, had more for other activities due to opportunity cost of the approach. Because the Shuttle was never designed for cheap launches of routine supply missions, but used for that purpose anyway in order to circularly justify the cost of the Space Shuttle, the US has vastly less capabilities and infrastructure in space.
Capabilities exist to be used. The unusual capabilities of the Shuttle were almost never used except in near trivial or even negative value applications (such as replacing Hubble optics rather than launching new Hubble replacement telescopes), thus, it's not relevant to our discussion of costs and capabilities, except as a low value demonstrator of the technology.
Let me give a couple of alternate history scenarios to indicate how bad the Space Shuttle was. Back in the late 1980s, it was clear that the Space Shuttle was going nowhere. For non-contrived missions, they only had a few military and commercial missions left (the military was even going through the trouble of building their own launch vehicle, the Titan IV in order to drop the use of the Space Shuttle entirely). At the same time, commercial space launch was starting to come into its own and soon after, the Russian space program would be seen as needing US customers in order to stay alive (and prevent near future nuclear and ballistic missile proliferation). Instead of running the Space Shuttle for another two decades, NASA could have dropped it in 1990, and contracted everything to fly on commercial launch, encouraging commercial launch providers to compete with each other 5-10 years before the Department of Defense did so with the EELV (Evolutionary Expendable Launch Vehicle) program, which encouraged both competition between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as the creation of SpaceX and the movement of Orbital Sciences into heavier payload markets.
The International Space Station (ISS) would have slightly lower capabilities (dimensions would be somewhat smaller), but it would be vastly cheaper due to most of the components being launched on US or Russian commercial launch vehicles. Most of the capabilities would remain (or even improve) due to the excision of the Space Shuttle and most international cooperation in the "critical path" from the process. It also means more money available for the unmanned space program.
Alternately, we could consider what would happen, if NASA hadn't gone with the Shuttle at all. In the early 1970s, the Saturn 1B had the necessary payload to duplicate that aspect of the Space Shuttle. And it would have been capable of launching a small reusable vehicle, meaning we could have had an experimental reusable vehicle at the scale and cost that an experimental vehicle should be at. This is an excellent discussion [selenianboondocks.com] of the huge opportunity cost of the Space Shuttle. It's hard to imagine what the results of having many tens of billions of dollars to throw at space activity would have done and that gain could always be squandered on further white elephants like the ISS.