NASA Admits 'At Current Cost Levels,' Its SLS Program is Unsustainable (arstechnica.com) 112
An anonymous reader shared this report from the senior space editor at Ars Technica:
In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently U.S. 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...
Moreover, the report indicates that NASA has not regularly updated its five-year production cost estimates for the rocket. The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage. Another problem with NASA's cost estimates is that they do not appear to account for delays to Artemis missions. It is probable that the Artemis II mission, a crewed flight around the Moon, will launch no earlier than 2025. The Artemis III crewed landing will likely slip to at least 2026, if not more, with additional delays down the line...
NASA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that they were concerned about the costs of the SLS rocket. "NASA recognizes the need to improve the affordability of the SLS program and is taking steps to do so," the report states. "Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions."
Moreover, the report indicates that NASA has not regularly updated its five-year production cost estimates for the rocket. The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage. Another problem with NASA's cost estimates is that they do not appear to account for delays to Artemis missions. It is probable that the Artemis II mission, a crewed flight around the Moon, will launch no earlier than 2025. The Artemis III crewed landing will likely slip to at least 2026, if not more, with additional delays down the line...
NASA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that they were concerned about the costs of the SLS rocket. "NASA recognizes the need to improve the affordability of the SLS program and is taking steps to do so," the report states. "Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions."
Reusability (Score:2)
NASA contractors have been getting away with the idea of disposable rockets for too long. NASA must insist on reusability. We do need an alternative to SoaceX, but SLS is not it.
Re:Reusability (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA must insist on reusability
NASA really doesn't have much say in the matter. They can insist, but Congress can say "No we want to keep this niffty jobs program".
Re:Reusability (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA must insist on reusability
NASA really doesn't have much say in the matter. They can insist, but Congress can say "No we want to keep this niffty jobs program".
^ THIS ^ in the BOLD print
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NASA must insist on reusability
NASA really doesn't have much say in the matter. They can insist, but Congress can say "No we want to keep this niffty jobs program".
That's why some call the SLS the Senate Launch System [competitivespace.org] ...
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Reusability on relatively infrequent humanned missions may not be economical. For one, it has more stringent safety and testing requirements.
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If you're planning on a moon base I suspect that the inhabitants were prefer that the visits not be "infrequent".
Re: Reusability (Score:3)
If it was reusable, perhaps the launches wouldnâ(TM)t be infrequent.
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SpaceX IS the alternative to NASA.
Re: Reusability (Score:2)
Re: Reusability (Score:2)
SLS is built by Northrop Grumman, not SpaceX. SpaceX is not a long-term government insider company, they are basically a service provider, like AWS but for space. So their shit is actually pretty close to on time and budget, relative to Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed etc., because they actually have other commercial contracts they need to fulfill, unlike all the others whose primary customer is governments.
Re: Reusability (Score:2)
NASA has never learned (Score:3)
Re:NASA has never learned (Score:5, Interesting)
SLS is absolutely the last NASA designed and built launch platform. Within the next 5 years not only will we likely have Starship but ULA's Vulcan, BO's New Glenn and probably Arianne 6 as well.
In the 50's and 60's with the Cold War in full swing and developments coming rapidly it made perfect sense for NASA to directly build its rockets but today with commercial launch supplying such an array of reliable vehicles there's no need anymore. SLS is the swan song for NASA launch and after they can safely drop it like a hot potato they can focus on the things they do really well like science and exploration and the other next gen stuff like nuclear propulsion and interplanetary probes.
Once Starship is flying regularly NASA can put work into doing something with it's capability.
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Exactly, NASA was on the right track in the 90s and early 2000s when they were pursuing reusable rockets. The biggest hurdle was politicians crippling NASA instead of giving it the resources it needed. Congress killed DC-X which had 8 successful hops ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ) and VentureStar. They should have stuck with DC-X instead of allowing one mishap to cancel the program. As for VentureStar, again .. instead of doubling down on stupidity they should have just allowed a redesign of the cry
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NASA never built its own rockets. It always used sub-contractors. What you mean is that it should do fixed cost contracts instead of cost-plus contracts and not put anything in the public domain.
A better choice is to go with the cheap but effective option of the Sea Dragon. The BFR is essentially just a Sea Dragon made more costly by using many complex engines instead of two simple ones, and launching from expensive infrastructure instead of from the ocean for cheap.
But all this ignores that the real reas
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It never "built" them persay but rockets like Atlas-V, Shuttle, SLS all had heavy NASA involvement from the design and also even in aspects of the manufacture (Michoud, Marshall). It wasn't really until the Commercial Crew Program that NASA got more hands off on the rocket design, really coming in more for their expertise on life support for the crew rating.
Going back to Sea Dragon would be fucking sweet, gotta agree there. Such a cool concept.
NASA without having to do launch itself can be much more focus
Re: NASA has never learned (Score:1)
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James Webb was expensive because it's a test-bed for next generation spy satellites. Other technology for the next gen sats is being researched on the X-23b fleet. Things like folding compound mirrors and ion rockets are key to the so-called KH-14 satellites. A networked constellation of six "super-Spitzers" with Hubble size primaries would deliver better results for less money than Webb. But that technique would be useless for spy satellites which basically need one big primary and can't work with a distri
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Sea Dragon is an interesting idea, but the concept of a "simple" 350 MN engine is a bit disingenuous. The Saturn V F-1 engine had about 8 MN of thrust, and they had terrible difficulties resolving combustion instability in the chamber, a problem that gets worse as engines get bigger. With modern computers and CFD codes, they might have luck doing so on an engine with 45 times the thrust, but I'm having trouble with that. Avoiding combustion instability is one of the main reasons for SpaceX developing the
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Enormous engines that can handle being submerged in the ocean.
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The engine bell is sealed by the ballast-erector system. It's only unsealed when firing and then sea water isn't a problem; it's a solution. (No pun intended.)
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Sure. Because salt water is only bad for the inside of things.
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It's not really bad for the marine grade stainless steel the Sea Dragon specs call for, nor the refractory alloys and ceramics the engine bell is made from. Literal rocket scientists designed the thing. They did test launches of smaller rockets as proof of concept. There's real world data on this. This is AM not FM design.
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Sure. And as the original reply pointed out, scaling engines up turned out to be very, very difficult due to combustion instability. I doubt having to start up under ten atmospheres of sea water pressure would have been helpful either.
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Both you and the previous gentleperson don't understand a rather esoteric piece of rocket engineering. I tried just explaining it quickly but that didn't work. So now I'm going to go into more detail of that fact.
Designing a rocket engine is hard. The hardest part of designing a rocket engine is designing the turbopump. What is a turbopump? Rockets burn a lot of fuel. So much fuel that getting a steady supply of fuel out of the tanks and into the combustion chamber is actually quite hard. Ignoring the vari
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The engine for the Sea Dragon was designed to be an ablatively-cooled, pressure-fed, multi-chamber/single-bell engine. It actually is that simple. Some later versions even exchanged this for a plug-style aerospike that cooled the excessive heating of the plug with fuel and used that heated fuel for an autogenous pressurization system and re-entry shield, allowing the Sea Dragon to be 100% reusable.
Because you use existing manufacturing capacity and don't need to build more infrastructure, the price of the
Re: NASA has never learned (Score:2)
More the problem is that theyâ(TM)re not allowed to fail. NASA is 40% a space agency, and 60% a publicity organisation. If their moon rocket destroys the pad, and then blows up before stage separation, they have a *huge* problem. SpaceX being a private company is able to take risks and do things faster and cheeper because itâ(TM)s not game over if that happens.
It's operating exactly as designed (Score:5, Insightful)
The Senate Lunch System is just another example of a long and successful line of taxpayer money redistribution schemes. It only fails if you actually expected it to ever get into space.
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Gotta keep that military budget fat though.
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This is actually a civilian program and doesn't impact the DoD bottom line.
One of the reasons it's always scrounging for funds. Some of the same contractors do the work, though, which is another reason.
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This is actually a civilian program and doesn't impact the DoD bottom line.
But it does pump a whole bunch of pork barrel money to a bunch of defense contractors. I'm assuming that's what the GP meant.
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"The purpose of a system is what it does".
It's not a NASA problem (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a Congress problem. Congresscritters need to stop dictating how money is used. They have forced NASA to issue those juicy contracts for SLS.
I worked in government procurement a long time ago. It was entirely normal - for big programs - for Congress to approve funding, only when you distributed contracts too all the right Congressional districts. This massively increased costs, because you had layers and layers of subcontractors, many of whom were completely unnecessary.
That said, if NASA had any guts, they would refuse to spend money on stupid things. Just let the money go unspent, and dare Congress to do anything about it. NASA's public image is good enough they could pull that off. Especially now that the GAO is on their side.
Comparison (Score:2)
Congress wants that money to be funneled to their preferred contractors.
To understand how wasteful this is, NASA's own numbers say SpaceX spent around $390 million to develop the Falcon 9 reusable rocket. The Falcon Heavy cost somewhere around $700 million to develop, at the upper end. Even if you combine the two, assuming they based development on the Heavy off of the 9, the total development cost of the Heavy is 1/10th the cost of the SLS.
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Being involved in that kind of procurement for many years now, i'd rather suggest that the Congressional redirection of funds towards preferred contractors tends to aim for maximum funding back to their districts/states, therefore jobs, therefore happy voters. One of the benefits of incumbency "I brought this home". It's a pretty simple calculus.
Re: Comparison (Score:2)
To be fair, heavy isnâ(TM)t able to lift anywhere near as much as SLS. Starship is costing similar amounts to SLS to develop - about $4-5bn a year; but it has the one key difference that thatâ(TM)s to launch hundreds of rockets over and over again, not to launch maybe 4 in total.
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If you're going to combine Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and such like JBMcB said, then it'd be fair to include shuttle development costs, which SLS used to "save" money. The quotes are deliberate because it's fairly evident that this strategy ended up costing more money instead.
Searching, the quotes right now is that cost for starship is ~$5-10B, and that they've spent ~$5B on it thus far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://qz.com/how-much-more-m... [qz.com]
https://spacenews.com/spacex-i... [spacenews.com]
SLS is already at $12B, a
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Deciding *how* to spend money is one of Congress's responsibilities. How else would you propose it be done - just hand out wads of cash to random people and tell them to do whatever they want with it?
Congress allocates funds inefficiently - spending vastly more than necessary to accomplish stated goals - because of political pressures.
We have a democracy where representatives are elected by local voters, whose voting is heavily influenced by local economic conditions - which votes in Congress directly affec
Re: It's not a NASA problem (Score:2)
Yes, handing out wads of cash to these agencies is precisely how this should be done. It is the job of these agencies to know their business, and to make spending decisions with all the domain knowledge they have. Congress micromanaging decisions that should be made by people with far more technical knowledge is ludicrous.
Re: It's not a NASA problem (Score:2)
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Its not just NASA, Congress forces the military to buy certain hardware in order to keep factories open and jobs in their state (for example it happened after world war 2 where the military was forced to pick the option that kept jobs going at the Consolidated Aircraft factory in Texas running)
Once-great NASA has turned into.. (Score:2)
... a politically directed jobs program for well connected companies
The main motivation for SLS was preserving shuttle jobs. It was written into law
All of NASA isn't rotten. Parts of it do great work, but the SLS is a really bad idea
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It also feels like they're using the FAA to hold back approvals for Starship because they know that it will make SLS obsolete once it's ready.
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Nasa has given SpaceX $4B so far for Starship and they are the first and prime contractor for HLS which NASA has deadlines to meet.
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... a politically directed jobs program for well connected companies The main motivation for SLS was preserving shuttle jobs. It was written into law All of NASA isn't rotten. Parts of it do great work, but the SLS is a really bad idea
I agree that SLS is a bad idea. It is nothing more than NASA saying, "Building these biggie things is the way we have always gone to the Moon."
NASA really should rethink the entire process of getting to the Moon. And if Congress doesn't like that, then NASA should tell Congress "NASA way or the highway".
The biggest challenge has always been getting people & payload safely into Earth's orbit.
The second biggest challenge is a tie between "not crashing the people & payload into the Moon" and "properly
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You know they're building a space station in lunar orbit to act as a gateway right?
Don't fight it, Embrace it! (Score:2)
This is going to be a problem as AI eats up more and more jobs.
So don't call it socialism, call it SLS, in the future we will all work on SLS!
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You see what the federal government currently does with our money, and you think "yes, more of that, please. It'll solve our problems"?
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And the private sector gave us juicero. That was a super efficient use of $120,000,000.
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Suckers want more money for the federal government. Suckers want more money for scams like Juicero.
Let Starship launch then (Score:1)
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Personally, I am usually for the environment, and I think regulations are good. I understand about preserving wildlife. I weigh that against getting Starship off the ground, and .. it is too great of a concept. Too great of a vehicle, to let sit on the ground. Lets kill a few little animals, fish and fungi.
Lets go colonize the Moon and Mars.
The problem is it's not really a few animals that are stopping Starship getting off the ground, that's just fandom speaking. If it was really an issue they'd just launch from somewhere else. What's holding them at the moment is the engineering issues they're still fixing, they've had to replace the launch pad and work on stuff like integrating Raptor 3 and ensuring the flight termination is a bit more destructive. They'll get there, this is a project way beyond anything they've done before, Falcon 9 was si
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Per your link spacex has allegedly done "thousands" of fixes and has already done much of what the FAA has asked, so what's less than 63 more fixes?
Re: Let Starship launch then (Score:2)
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SpaceX said they're ready to go four days ago. It's not like they've been waiting for FAA approval for months.
The FAA also wrapped up their investigation on a major mishap in about five months, which is also pretty good. The flight termination system failure was a major problem.
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And I'm sure as soon as SpaceX demonstrates that to the FAA they'll be good to go. It's been a couple of days.
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The flight termination system has been addressed already buy using more powerfull explosives, as the explosives went off at the right time, but the starship and booster were (unexpectedly) too sturdy, the actual explosion was due to tumbling and then rocket breaking up.
It's going to take a bit more than a bigger boom stick. Given they actually flew a FTS that wasn't up to the job (which is a big no-no, this is the one thing you really don't want to screw up), SpaceX have probably been made to submit a full set of engineering calculations and experimentation results for this coming shot. They need to prove that it not only will cut all the parts of the airframe it is supposed to but it needs to cut them into right sized pieces. The plus side is they have all the data and
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The failure of the launch abort system is a *really big deal*, and I don't think people understand that. A lot of people would have died if the rocket had decided to go on a ballistic trajectory and drop the second stage onto a populated area.
The abort system is *the* safeguard against that. It's like a failure of the emergency stop system on power equipment; People die from that kind of failure.
Photos of debris flying into a minivan (intentionally parked within the exclusion zone as a mobile came
Re: Let Starship launch then (Score:2)
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And that's why there are regulators for these things. Fixing a critical safety system isn't as simple as "add some more explosives and it should be good" and no, Starship resuming launch testing this week, this month or this year is not more important than not dropping it on a city.
Nobody at SpaceX wants anything like that to happen because it would absolutely shut down any chance of continuing the program. Both the FAA and SpaceX took their time doing a thorough investigation and fixing the problems with a
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Specifically, it would give anti-SpaceX groups the ammunition they need to shut them down. Legacy aerospace companies have bought and paid-for legislators that would be arguing a "Space safety" bill on the floor in the Senate within days. When it passed it would bury SpaceX in years of red tape. That bill probably already exists in some lobbyists drafts folder; They just need
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Or the rocket going straight in the wrong direction and landing in a foreign city of half a million.
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I doubt SpaceX or anyone will be allowed to launch over a populated area. There's a reason nearly all launches from the US go over water. And in fact most countries do that too. Israel, for example, launches their orbital rockets in a retrograde direction because that's the only direction they could go to ensure they didn't overfly any populated land.
Re: Let Starship launch then (Score:2)
Re: Let Starship launch then (Score:2)
They are doing. In fact only 2 days ago they said theyâ(TM)d wrapped up the mishap investigation into the first launch, and would issue a launch license for the second once 63 remediations had been made to correct the problems encountered on the first launch.
SLS is two things (Score:3)
Personally, I think that SpaceX is gonna succeed. Seems to me that they're probably gonna do a few more Starship crashes and explosions and then manage to sort the problems out. And I suspect that Musk is reaching "peak-right-wing" and he probably won't go all that much crazier.
To the hard liberals - you're never gonna love the guy. But there are far worse conservatives. Life is messy.
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Just to counter your anecdote with an anecdote - after 3 years of working with my fellow programmers, two of the best ones felt comfortable enough (I made no secret of believing in conspiracy theories involving collusion between the left and right to fuck up the country) to tell me that they had voted for Trump.
Arrogant and self-aggrandizing statements from your echo chamber really don't carry any weight. Just like the Nazis were an extreme fringe of the German socialist movement that hit upon the tactic
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I have no patience for the extremes on either side. But nowadays, the conservatives le
Re: SLS is two things (Score:2)
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Lol, no. The American revolution was planned and executed by a bunch of local statesmen and military leaders, most or all of them very rich dudes. The idea was to make a statement to strengthen their negotiating position but they misjudged how seriously the British would take it.
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Your synopsis brings to mind Wolfgang Pauli's "So bad it's not ever wrong" quote.
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I'm not American. So I probably know American history better than you do. Our own history is often taught to us in a very optimistic way. Americans put a lot of weight on their plucky rebel founding. But go ahead, look up some of your "founding fathers" and see whether you'd describe them as "a few idiots."
Like George Washington, a general in the army under the British, elected member of government, owner of thousands of acres of land and owner of a luxury import/export business.
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I’d even go so far as to say that 2/3 of our population understands that the country wasn’t actually founded in a burst of white light and heavenly music, by Washington, Jefferson, Jesus, and the Almighty Lord, in that order of importance. D
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The virgina militia was under the british. I said it that way on purpose.
But I see we've gone from "not even wrong" to quibbling about details. Lol.
Re: SLS is two things (Score:2)
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I think you'd find that the leaders of the American Revolution were more fans of French left wing radical political philosophy than right wing idiots.
Unless you're talking about the failed one a couple years ago.
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The "American left" would still be right wing in most other democratic developed nations. Your actual 'fringe left' is so tiny it can be ignored as completely irrelevant. Over half the nation looks at the MAGA crowd as a bunch of dangerous morons, and anyone paying the slightest attention to their clown show can't honestly argue they're anything else.
Nobody's scapegoating Trump supporters - they're objectively awful fucking people regardless of whether it's because they're true believers or simply selfis
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Quite fortunately, I don't care what Auties think!
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Imagine my surprise that a MAGAt says they don't care what others think unless it's in agreement with them.
The truth is, you do care. You want to feel like you're in power instead of on your way out like the marginal humans you are should be. No matter how many people you blame your failures on... they're yours. Until you take responsibility for your own life and the consequences of your choices, until you develop some empathy for others, you're always going to feel like you're being persecuted even as y
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Well, we can certainly agree that extremism is ruining America.
I'm looking forward to the collapse of the MAGA cult when your Stupid Hitler is convicted. It's hilarious because your own Republican politicians knew from the start that siding with Trump would be a fatal blow to themselves and their party, but rather than take a principled stand they did whatever they had to in order to cling to power for a few more years. ...And all you flag-waving faux-patriots kept sending money to every MAGA fundraiser yo
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It takes a special kind of fuckwit to compare the American right--a party often in power in a minority of votes--to the Jews in Nazi Germany.
It's this kind of shit that causes people to try and steal elections
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It takes a coward to straw man an argument and a ball-less wonder to ad hominem on top of it.
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SpaceX could fail because they work in a vacuum without considering 70 years of technological history.
Imagine having your heavy lifter loop and explode endangering a town without even reaching 25 miles because you were too fucking stupid to make proper flame trench system like normal successful heavy lifting rocket systems always had. What else have the SpaceX theory-paper boys ignored with their craniums jammed firmly into their rectums?
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Probably. Yes, they could still fail.
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SpaceX is a lot more willing to tolerate something that goes wrong because if it goes wrong, so be it, it gets fixed and you try again.
But now SpaceX is finding out that there are things that can go wrong in ways that cause damage (or have the potential to cause damage) to things that aren't actually connected to the rocket tests and that "if it goes wrong, we fix it and try again" isn't going to work if "it goes wrong" means potentially dropping massive lumps of metal onto populated areas.
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The lack of a launch trench was completely unrelated to the failure of the launch abort system on the *test* vehicle.
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so what? the craft was already a threat on launch pad before release, throwing rocks into a state park. Flight termination system wouldn't have saved any struck hikers, fishers, or campers.
irrelevant whether a "test" or "real" vehicle endangered human life and property with bad engineering.
FAA likely won't authorize another death and destruction missile from this company for a long time, if ever
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I expect the FAA will let them launch sooner than later. It's just a question of i-crossing and t-dotting.
As a fan of the company I'm glad of that, but I hope they've gotten the point about the criticality of range safety. Screwups that could kill civilians are not ok.
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Trying to assess the politics of geeks by traditional standards is not going to work out too well.
The social justice crap doesn't play well. They're smart enough to realize, generally, that favoring one group over another in any way just creates more division later. Same reason the "build the wall" shit doesn't play all that well. It's just another blame game, this time immigrants for lack of mindless jobs that pay mondo bucks. Politics for the dumb are the order of the day.
Usually if you find a real par
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The US needs to maintain an independent heavy lift capability, because Musk has proven unreliable.
When StarLink might have been used by a US ally to attack Russian ships, he didn't pick up the phone and ask the US government want it wanted him to do. He made the decision himself.
The US military likes StarLink, they even have a military special version of it called StarShield. But it's all controlled by Musk right now, and they are talking about the need to build their own.
The US just can't allow Musk to be
Half Baked Report (Score:2)
Opinion (Score:2)
...SLS costs unsustainable...
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shockedPikachuFace.jpg
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Space enthusiasts and budget hawks (extremely odd bedfellows) have been pointing at the absolute insanity of SLS hoovering up NASA's budget for more than a decade.
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...SLS costs unsustainable...
<meme> shockedPikachuFace.jpg </meme>
Space enthusiasts and budget hawks (extremely odd bedfellows) have been pointing at the absolute insanity of SLS hoovering up NASA's budget for more than a decade.
Yeah, but it's still shocking that NASA is actually admitting it. :-)
Gulf State Pork (Score:2)
There's nothing goin' on here boys. Mint julip anyone? These summas sho' are a-gittin' hotta. Oo-wee!
NASA c-suite lacks urgency (Score:2)
When NASA got shit done, they spent like crazy but the money mostly went to something more than peripherally related to the goal of getting to orbit and getting to the moon.
The missing ingredient is the sense of urgency in getting to orbit to catch up to the Russians and getting to the moon before the Russians. That sense of urgency has a way of aligning the vectors, even the graft-prone ones, in the generally the same direction.
That sense of urgency does not exist now. Everyone and their mother cared about
Re: NASA c-suite lacks urgency (Score:2)
Just wait until China is ready to start trying to plant a "red flag on the red planet". The urgency will definitely return.
I have no doubt that China will be first on Mars, and I think everyone's OK with that. The Soviet Union got to have a bunch of firsts (satellite, animals, then man in space, then first real space station), the US put the first human on the moon, and China's going to willingly pay a heavy toll to get its boots on Mars first. Frankly, the US won't risk dozens of human lives just to win th
Corruption (Score:1)
We can't afford not to... (Score:1)