NASA Finally Admits What Everyone Already Knows: SLS is Unaffordable
In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program.
"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.
[...]
NASA recently said that it is working with the primary contractor of the SLS rocket's main engines, Aerojet, to reduce the cost of each engine by 30 percent, down to $70.5 million by the end of this decade.However, NASA's inspector general, Paul Martin, said this claim was dubious. According to Martin, when calculating the projected cost savings of the new RS-25 engines, NASA and Aerojet only included material, engineering support, and touch labor, while project management and overhead costs are excluded.
And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.
FAA grounds Starship until SpaceX takes 63 'corrective actions'
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
"The vehicle’s structural margins appear to be better than we expected," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joked with reporters in the wake of the late April test launch. Per the a report from the US Fish and WIldlife Service, however, the failed launch resulted in a 385-acre debris field that saw concrete chunks flung more than 2,600 feet from the launchpad, a 3.5-acre wildfire and "a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site.”
"Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices," the FAA release reads. Furthermore, the FAA says that SpaceX will have to not only complete that list but also apply for and receive a modification to its existing license "that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch." In short, SpaceX has reached the "finding out" part.
[...] "SpaceX is also implementing a full suite of system performance upgrades unrelated to any issues observed during the first flight test," the blog reads. Those improvements include a new hot-stage separation system which will more effectively decouple the first and second stages, a new electronic "Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system" for its Raptor heavy rockets, and "significant upgrades" to the orbital launch mount and pad system which just so happened to have failed in the first test but is, again, completely unrelated to this upgrade. Whether those improvements overlap with the 63 that the FAA is imposing, could not be confirmed at the time of publication as the FAA had not publically released them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:35PM (21 children)
Those SLS engines have been a pretty glaring farce all along. They are nothing more than money sinks. Time to stop throwing good money after bad, and contract with SpaceX for your engines.
No, I don't believe that I'd contract with Blue Origin. They don't have a very bad track record - but then, they don't have much record. Do business with SpaceX, or maybe the Euros can build the rockets. Oh, wait. 'Murica, right? It's got to be done in America? Cool, I guess. At least we won't get the cheapest contractor from China.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Touché) by Ox0000 on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:14PM (5 children)
Exactly, because we believe in the Free Market... until we can't compete.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:01AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:35PM (3 children)
What makes you designate this as a "Free Market hate thread"?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:57PM (2 children)
PS, I loathe ITAR.
All different posters.
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Sunday September 10 2023, @05:19PM (1 child)
Fair enough.
For clarity: my post was not intended as a diss on the Free Market as a concept, instead it was aimed at the hypocrisy of the USA pretending to be, want, or aim for one, because the USA does not.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @05:46PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:52PM
Contract with Blue Origin too, if for no other reason than to have an alternative and be able to get at least a little competition. If they know they've got a secure revenue stream for this reason, they can start catching up. A duopoly isn't great either; so those Euro rockets are indeed an option. In a post-Putin world, Russia might pull its head out its ass too but we can't wait.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday September 09 2023, @11:57PM (11 children)
Very much so. Our military has become very dependent on orbital infrastructure, and it's a major strategic consideration that we maintain the ability to service and/or replace it no matter what is happening in the rest of the world.
For everything else? Your call - is it better to save some money while contributing to another nation's space program, or pay a bit more to fund our own?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:49AM (10 children)
SLS is not suitable for military launches. There will be one available about every two years, with no backups, and they're all slated for the Artemis program.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:51PM (9 children)
Definitely not optimal - though I guarantee you those Artemis missions would be bumped if there were a critical military need.
We do need something though, and SLS isn't it. Could have maybe been for a while if it lived up to the promise and timeline of the initial proposal - but we all know how that went.
So long as SpaceX is operating fully from US soil, we mostly have it. Though with a fully private launch provider I'd be in favor of some government support for a domestic competitor as well.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:59PM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 12 2023, @01:48PM (7 children)
>There never will be a critical military need coming from Artemis
Umm, right?
However, there could conceivably be a critical military need for the rockets that were intended to launch Artemis - in which case those Artemis missions would be postponed (bumped) as the rocket was used for something more urgent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 12 2023, @09:33PM (6 children)
Maybe in a Hollywood movie. I think they'd have vastly better luck with a Superheavy.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 13 2023, @01:26AM (5 children)
Only after SuperHeavy is proven to work. Then yeah, that'll change everything. As long as Musk doesn't decide some other government can give him a better deal.
I'm absolutely rooting for the death of SLS, but the original plan wasn't actually that bad. Just... pretty much everything since then.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 13 2023, @02:43AM (4 children)
My take is that the original plan in the early 1970s was bad, and it hasn't aged well since.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday September 14 2023, @12:25AM (3 children)
It finally flew successfully last year, as I recall what problems they still had were with the capsule rather than the rocket.
Of course it remains to be seen if they actually finally FIXED the problems with their frankenstein launch gantry, or just finally got lucky.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 14 2023, @11:53AM (2 children)
That sort of spending generates high expectations for me. Developing a replacement for Saturn V, which really has been going on since the Space Shuttle was merely an idea, has turned out to be an immense failure. This is anti-progress - squandering money on expensive white elephants actually hinders human progress in space.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday September 14 2023, @02:08PM (1 child)
Ahh, well, if you're looking at the money end of things then... I guess it was SUPER successful... just not by rocket standards.
After all the plan as originally approved by congress was designed to be such a pork-heavy abomination that it couldn't possibly be canceled when the administration changed like the previous rocket had been.
In retrospect it was probably pretty stupid to combine "cancel-proof pork" and "cost-plus contract" into the same program...Or brilliant, depending on who you ask.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 15 2023, @12:21PM
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday September 10 2023, @03:38PM (1 child)
It's got to be done in America to develop the technological capability and to keep it out of the hands of enemies. That's what ITAR is all about. Let the enemies spend their own time and money doing it.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Wednesday September 13 2023, @01:35AM
Gotta prove to the Soviets that our German rocket scientists are better than their German rocket scientists...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:52PM (1 child)
However far ahead Artemis is, China is beating us back to the moon.
We aren't a country that does things anymore, we're a country where our politics consists solely of manipulating doddering administrators to make sure we're the ones drinking from the public trough.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 12 2023, @02:25PM
That does seem to be the atmosphere. However, I don't think China has any rockets capable of doing much more than putting boots on the moon, if that - and we already did that six times. Not much of a race when they're following in our footsteps fifty-plus years later.
The current race is for who establishes a permanent outpost first - and that's likely to be down to when SpaceX gets the full Starship+orbital refueling + lunar landing system working, versus... whatever China might have planned. I mean, in theory they could use Starship as well, but I suspect that would hurt their national pride. Any word on whether they're actually making progress toward a Starship clone, or was that just propaganda?
And even that race is largely symbolic, though it will doubtless serve to lay claim to some of the choicest spots on the Moon. The important race will be who establishes useful industrial infrastructure first.
And towards that end I think China may very well take the lead, simply because NASA is aiming at the rim of Shackleton Crater, which is a great location for a proof-of concept outpost, but has very limited research or expansion potential - they'll basically be building an outpost on a mountain ridge kms above the surrounding terrain, and neither the crater nor the surrounding lowlands have access to decent solar power. Not to mention the difficulty of reaching the "nearby" locations of interest - the bottom of the crater is 8km away and 4km down, while the lunar surface is ~4km away and 2km down. That's a long way to travel across a mountain without the benefit of roads or other infrastructure.
China meanwhile appears to be eyeballing more tropical locations where there appear to be lava tubes, which have great potential for cheap outpost expansion, especially considering that the underground temperature at low latitudes appears to be a stable, comfortable ~70F(21C). There will probably be a lot less water available, but plenty of regolith (which is mostly oxygen that we know how to extract). And since we'll likely need to import a lot of carbon anyway to establish an ecology, imported oil is a convenient source of both carbon and the hydrogen needed to turn local oxygen into water.
Of course Blue Alchemy claims to have already developed and tested the system needed to convert raw regolith into finished solar panels, which will catapult lunar development forward - which could give the US a big advantage if we secured an exclusive license to use it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:54PM (3 children)
It's almost $93 billion in the hole, with more on the way.
https://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/2023/05/26/report-nasa-spent-billions-more-than-expected-for-artemis-and-sls/70258102007/ [floridatoday.com]
Hopefully the contractors did the right thing and used SLS to reverse money launder some of the funds to a better, more secretive program. You know.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @08:06PM (2 children)
93 billion is a big number for sure, but in the grand scheme of things, and for the duration, it's not /that/ much...
But cool story, now do toys for the military!
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Saturday September 09 2023, @08:26PM
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4077404-the-war-on-wasteful-spending-f-35-funding-fight-returns-to-congress/ [thehill.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @05:10PM
Only to the innumerate. For a space-based example, that's a bit shy of 1400 Falcon 9 launches which could launch the mass of 70 International Space Stations to orbit.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sweettea on Sunday September 10 2023, @02:36AM (3 children)
"In short, SpaceX has reached the "finding out" part."
If this is intended to claim that SpaceX was fucking around previously, that's pretty rich -- why not consider Linux to be fucking around compared to the virtuous, extensively pre-planned and change-controlled IBM OS/2? Oh wait, that's right, turns out a rapid pace of development and experimenting with new ways of doing things actually turns out to make the world better sometimes.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Sunday September 10 2023, @03:41PM (1 child)
What became of the ideas in Plan 9 and Inferno?
I wonder if Space X is having trouble with Starship because key people have left the company? Judging by the mistakes they made, I think that's a good bet. Real experts wouldn't do that kind of stupid (unless overruled by beancounters of course).
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:57PM
Or because Musk is a chronically over-optimistic and appears to be succumbing to a degenerative case of over-inflated ego.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Sunday September 10 2023, @04:41PM
OS/2 biggest problem was image - the concept of "half an operating system" was hard to sell, and much to some advertising agency's surprise, singing nuns don't appeal to the people in IT purchasing much either.
The product itself was excellent, but far too late.
Microsoft (who had been contracted to make OS/2) sold a half baked version as a Windows upgrade first, and it won the race, despite being a PoS.
The only shock and horror in this story was that IBM, contrary to widespread speculation, did not sue the living daylights out of Bill Gates.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!