[Space] Space Launch System, SLS - Page 15

HOUSTON — For the first time since the Apollo era, NASA on Monday named a crew of astronauts for a lunar expedition.

The astronauts will fly around the moon in a mission that would precede the first human landing there since 1972.

In an event here, NASA officials said astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman will be joined by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on the Artemis II mission, which is scheduled to launch late next year.

The announcement comes about four months after the successful completion of the Artemis I flight, a test that for the first time launched the massive Space Launch System rocket and sent the Orion crew capsule, without any astronauts on board, in orbit around the moon.

With the naming of the crew, a diverse group that includes the first woman, African American and Canadian to fly on a moon mission, NASA’s Artemis campaign now has human faces attached to it — some of the best and brightest of the astronaut corps — which the space agency hopes will help solidify its support among members of Congress as it prepares for its next flights.

Those missions are months away, however, and likely to be delayed. And the attention of Congress and the American people is often fickle, especially when it comes to space exploration. Even during the height of the Apollo era, polling showed that people’s interest soon waned after the first lunar landing and that they wondered why money wasn’t being spent on projects back home.

But so far, NASA has, for the first time in decades, been able to build momentum for a deep-space exploration campaign. Last month, the White House proposed a $27.2 billion budget for NASA, a 7 percent increase over this year, with increased funding for Artemis. The Artemis program is also designed to be more politically resilient with the participation and investment of other countries, the growing commercial space industry, and more ambitious mission objectives.

The introductions came a few miles from the Johnson Space Center, in a hangar at Ellington Field, used for astronaut flight training. Many of the active astronauts were in attendance, save for the two currently on the International Space Station, as the names of the four crew members were called. Taking the stage to rousing cheers, they were lauded by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson as “the first humans to fly to the vicinity of the moon in more than 50 years.”

Unlike the Apollo missions, in which 12 men walked on the lunar surface and then came home, the Artemis program aims to build a more sustainable presence on and around the moon. It is planning to assemble a space station, known as Gateway, in lunar orbit that astronauts would visit on their way to the moon’s surface. Instead of returning to the moon’s equatorial region, NASA is now focused on the lunar south pole, where there is water in the form of ice in its permanently shadowed craters. Water is not only vital for human life, but its component parts — hydrogen and oxygen — can be used as rocket propellant.

As the United States prepares to return humans to the moon, Nelson has said the country is in a space race with China, which is also planning to send astronauts to the south pole. It has also been working to establish norms of behavior that would govern activities in space and on the moon by having allied nations sign an agreement known as the Artemis Accords.

As part of the Artemis program, NASA has said the first woman and the first person of color would walk on the moon as it seeks to create a more diverse astronaut corps. And the Artemis II crew embodied that diversity. “We’re not truly answering humanity’s call to explore unless we represent all of humanity,” Koch said in an interview. “And it’s awesome to be a part of this mission during a time when we recognize how important that is.”

Koch, who flew to the International Space Station in 2019 on a Russian Soyuz rocket, was part of the first all-female spacewalk. She also holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space. She began her career as an electrical engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Glover is a Navy captain and a fighter jet test pilot, who flew on SpaceX’s first operational human spaceflight mission. He would serve as the Artemis II mission pilot. Wiseman, also a Navy captain, would be the commander. His previous spaceflight was in 2014 aboard a Russian Soyuz. Hansen was chosen as the first Canadian to lead a NASA astronaut class in 2017, but has not flown to space before.

“Each of these adventurers has their own story, but together they represent our creed: e pluribus unum, out of many one,” Nelson said in introducing the crew. “This is the power of space. This is the power of our space program. It unites people.”

Speaking to a cheering crowd, Glover said, “I pray that we can continue to serve as a source of inspiration for cooperation and peace not just between nations but in our own nation.”

The Artemis II mission would be somewhat similar to Apollo 8, in which Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the moon in 1968 before the Apollo 11 landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The last of the Apollo missions was Apollo 17, and no people have been back to the vicinity of the moon since.

The Artemis II crew is to travel 6,400 miles beyond the far side of the moon in what is known as a “free-return trajectory,” where Earth’s gravity will pull Orion back after the spacecraft flies by the moon, NASA has said. Beyond the moon, the crew “will be able to see the Earth and the moon from Orion’s windows, with the moon close in the foreground and the Earth nearly a quarter-million miles in the background,” according to the space agency. The entire trip is expected to last about 10 days.

Glover said in an interview that the training for the mission should start this summer, and that it would take about 18 months. While the astronauts won’t land on the surface or dock with another spacecraft, they will test out Orion’s maneuvering capabilities, reorienting it once it separates from the second stage.

Asked whether he was disappointed that an assignment to Artemis II might preclude him from the next mission and a landing on the lunar surface, he said, “No. The best mission is the one in front of you.”

The astronauts here are also training on other new spacecraft. In addition to the Orion capsule, NASA flies crews to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.

Boeing also has a contract to fly astronauts to the orbiting laboratory, but it recently said its first flight with astronauts would be delayed again, this time to July, as it continues to work with NASA to make sure its Starliner spacecraft meets all of NASA’s requirements.

SpaceX also won the contract to develop the spacecraft that would meet up with Orion in lunar orbit and then ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the moon for the Artemis III lunar landing flight. SpaceX is hoping to launch Starship, a fully reusable vehicle, for the first time later this month from its facility in South Texas.

Given the complexity of the new systems, the Artemis II flight could easily slip into 2025, and a human landing, tentatively scheduled for 2025, could also be delayed.

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.

Poor tools to understand true costs

The Government Accountability Office expressed serious concerns about NASA's decision not to measure production costs of SLS rocket elements, including the core stages and rocket engines needed for future launches. Instead, NASA told the report authors that it plans to "monitor production costs and affordability of the SLS program via the five-year production and operations cost estimate."

However, the report states, these are "poor tools" for a cost baseline for the SLS rocket program and will make it difficult for taxpayers to measure costs and the performance of NASA and its contractors over time. 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. At least one NASA official apparently told the Government Accountability Office that these delays would have no cost impacts, which seems highly improbable.

"Some NASA officials told us that changes to Artemis mission dates should not affect the SLS program’s cost estimate," the report states. "Other officials noted that the program’s cost estimate would be expected to increase to account for the delay to the Artemis IV mission, which shifted from 2026 to 2028."

How to pare back unsustainable costs

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."

Officials from the space agency said they had a four-step plan to reduce costs of the SLS rocket program over time:

• Stabilize the flight schedule
  
• Achieve learning curve efficiencies
  
• Encourage innovation
  
• Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
  

Setting aside that some of these goals sound suspiciously like corporate speak, the report makes clear that these are aspirational aims for now. "NASA, however, has not yet identified specific program-level cost-saving goals which it hopes to achieve," the authors write. "NASA has made some progress toward implementing these strategies, but it is too early to fully evaluate their effect on cost."

Can NASA really control costs?

While NASA certainly deserves credit for talking about the excessive cost of the SLS rocket—a fact that has been pointed out by critics for more than a decade but largely ignored by NASA officials and congressional leaders—it is not at all clear that they will be able to control costs. For example, 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.

In recent years NASA has acknowledged that its large Space Launch System rocket is unaffordable and has sought to bring its costs down to a more reasonable level. The most recent estimate is that it costs $2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, and this does not include add-ons such as ground systems, integration, a payload, and more.

Broadly speaking, NASA's cost-reduction plan is to transfer responsibility for production of the rocket to a new company co-owned by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, which are key contractors for the rocket. This company, "Deep Space Transport," would then build the rockets and sell them to NASA. The space agency has said that this services-based model could reduce the cost of the rocket by as much as 50 percent.

However, in a damning new report, NASA's inspector general, Paul Martin, says that is not going to happen. Rather, Martin writes, the cost of building the rocket is actually likely to increase.

"Our analysis shows a single SLS Block 1B will cost at least $2.5 billion to produce—not including Systems Engineering and Integration costs—and NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic," Martin wrote in an audit of the agency's plans, which was published on Thursday.

Extremely high costs

The main problem with the SLS rocket is not its performance—the vehicle's debut during the Artemis I mission in late 2022 was virtually flawless—but rather its extremely high cost. Independent reviews of the vehicle, which Congress mandated that NASA build more than a decade ago, have found that NASA is unlikely to have a sustainable deep space exploration program built around such an expensive heavy-lift rocket.

Digging into Martin's report, it's not difficult to see why. The SLS rocket is powered by four main engines derived from the Space Shuttle program. The cost of these four engines is $582.7 million, or $146 million per engine. This means that a single engine on NASA's rocket costs roughly the same amount that the space agency paid for an entire mission on the Falcon Heavy rocket—$178 million for the Europa Clipper spacecraft.



Seriously, stop and think about that.

"Given the enormous costs of the Artemis campaign, it is crucial that NASA achieve some significant measure of its affordability goals," Martin wrote in the new report. "Failure to do so will significantly hinder the sustainability of NASA’s deep space human exploration efforts."

Cost savings are unlikely

However, he said, NASA's approach to saving money is unlikely to work. Martin bases his conclusion on a number of persuasive factors. But the main reason is that NASA's estimate of a 50 percent cost reduction appears to be based on magical and wishful thinking.

Boeing is the contractor that builds the core stage of the SLS rocket, which includes the propellant tanks and four main engines. Martin notes that Boeing only reduced its workforce by 13 percent as it moved from building the rocket's first core stage to the second one. Then, the report drily adds, "Boeing historically has increased costs under their contracts."

Nor are savings likely to come from the engines, despite the fact that their per-unit cost is nearly $150 million. Rather, Martin's analysis finds that the cost of future engines is likely to go up: "Despite initiatives aimed at cutting costs by gaining manufacturing efficiencies utilizing 3D printing and using less costly materials for RS-25 engines beyond Artemis VII, we instead found cost increases for future engines."

Martin also notes that there is no incentive for Deep Space Transport to lower its prices. The agency has not committed to move to fixed-price contracting and has allowed Boeing to incorporate limited rights data into the design of the core stage. In other words, no one else can build the SLS rocket, so if the space agency wants to continue to buy them, it must do so from Boeing and Northrop.

Finally, Martin cites history. In the mid-1990s NASA transferred the Space Shuttle production from agency management to a commercial services contract, citing the goal of saving money. Boeing and Lockheed Martin created a new company, United Space Alliance, to provide Shuttle services on a sole-source basis to NASA, like what will be done with the SLS rocket.

So, did costs go down? Alas, no. "As a result of the transfer of Shuttle production and operations responsibilities from NASA-managed contracts to a commercial services contract, we estimate Space Shuttle operations costs increased approximately 38 percent to $1.45 billion per launch," Martin wrote.

Consider buying commercial

As part of his report, Martin makes several recommendations to NASA. Perhaps most strikingly, the inspector general suggests that NASA consider using commercial heavy-lift vehicles as an alternative to the SLS rocket for future Artemis missions.

"The Agency may soon have more affordable commercial options to carry humans to the Moon and beyond," the report states. "In our judgment, the Agency should continue to monitor the commercial development of heavy-lift space flight systems and begin discussions of whether it makes financial and strategic sense to consider these options as part of the Agency’s longer-term plans to support its ambitious space exploration goals."

The politics of this are messy, of course. In 2010, Congress directed NASA to build a heavy-lift rocket and crew capsule using existing contracts from the canceled Constellation effort, and this resulted in the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. Congress has tended not to care as NASA has racked up tens of billions of dollars in development costs for these vehicles.

This may or may not change given the likelihood of budget cuts in the near future. But what now seems clear is that the SLS rocket will never cost less than it does now, and it probably will cost more in the future. Perhaps it is, indeed, time to consider an offramp before NASA signs contracts to buy SLS rockets for the next decade or two.