Cost Overruns and Delays: NASA's Artemis Moon Rocket Will Cost $6B More, Take Lo...
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Cost Overruns and Delays: NASA's Artemis Moon Rocket Will Cost $6B More, Take Longer
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"An independent report looking into the development of NASA's new moon rocket has found significant cost overruns and delays that could harm the agency's plans to put astronauts back on the moon," reports Space.com.
Their article cites specifically "increases in costs related to contracts awarded to Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman for SLS's propulsion systems," citing a 50-page report published Thursday by NASA's Inspector General:
Altogether, the four contracts for the rocket's booster and engine were initially projected to cost $7 billion over a span of 14 years, but are now projected to cost at least $13.1 billion over nearly 25 years. "NASA continues to experience significant scope growth, cost increases, and schedule delays on its booster and RS-25 engine contracts, resulting in approximately $6 billion in cost increases and over 6 years in schedule delays above NASA's original projections," the report found.
These significant increases were caused by a variety of long-standing, interrelated management issues impacting both the SLS development campaign and the wider Artemis program, the report notes, including "some of which represent potential violations of federal contracting requirements." The use of heritage RS-25 engines and boosters from the space shuttle and Constellation programs for the new SLS rocket was intended to bring significant cost and schedule savings over developing new systems. But the "complexity of developing, updating, and integrating new systems along with heritage components proved to be much greater than anticipated," according to the report.
To remedy this, the report makes a number of recommendations to NASA management to increase transparency, accountability and affordability of the SLS booster and engine contracts, including switching from "cost-plus" awards towards a fixed-price contract structure. However, the assessment still finds the enormous cost of SLS hard to manage for NASA and damaging to its long term "Moon to Mars" plans. "Without greater attention to these important safeguards, NASA and its contracts will continue to exceed planned cost and schedule, resulting in a reduced availability of funds, delayed launches, and the erosion of the public's trust in the Agency's ability to responsibly spend taxpayer money and meet mission goals and objectives — including returning humans safely to the moon and onward to Mars."
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared the article along with a YouTube video with excerpts from recently released high-resolution video of the rocket's last launch.
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There is nothing quite like the commercial environment when the incentives are there to make it safe, make it quick, and mind the store. I get the feeling that government jobs are drawn out as long as possible and lack the expediency of the private sector. SpaceX could very well be the start of a whole new industry to replace government inefficiencies.
Do not get me wrong, NASA played a crucial role for many decades. But recently everything has been going so slow and expensive nothing is getting done - aside from space probe launches. I would love to hear other takes on this.
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It's not the commercial environment that does it. It's the incentives package.* You need one that fosters good management**. "Being commercial" is one way to try and shape that environment, but it can easily backfire.*** It certainly isn't the only tool in the box.
NASA has been around for a while so it knows how to survive in its environment. And sometimes it gets a rotten hand to play. Look at the space shuttle: That one was fantastically expensive to run, as in you could do how many commercial launches f
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For one thing, the Space Shuttle program required a standing army of 35,000 people to keep running. Something tells me that no SpaceX vehicle takes anything like that number.
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That's the whole kit and caboodle. In the 90s Congress had expansive goals for the jobs supplied by the program. Those goals were curtailed a bit in the aughts. By 2006, after W sank his teeth into it, the entire program was being ran by just 5,100. For SpaceX many of the one-to-ones for roles, public servants serve the role. Like NASA's weather coordinator which eventually went away, for SpaceX that's just checking in with NOAA.
So yeah, SpaceX isn't going to have the same number, they offset some of t
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Good management and government are usually incompatible. We all know what ultimately happens....a bloated bureaucracy that is neither fast nor cheap.
Musk will get to the moon long before NASA.
Like a lot of tech that we take for granted today, space flight was a product of government effort/funding, but it's time to let private enterprise take over. Sadly, shareholders are a lot less tolerant of delays and waste than voters.
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It might be instructive to reconsider the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era and the 'national goal' of 'putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade'. How much of that success was a result of the urgency and commitment then to achieve the collective goal? Costs were not a significant issue then, where they could be now, but the urgency is lacking.
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"Musk will get to the moon long before NASA."
MusK will get to Mars TWICE before NASA even gets to the Moon.
There, fixed that for you.
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When I write grants for federal funding, I do my best to estimate the time different things will take. We are required to provide milestones and time lines. Invariably, these end up being optimistic, no matter how accurate one tries to make them before the fact.
Were anyone to re-evaluate these time lines halfway through the project, it would be clear that the project would be late. It is the nature of human ability to make projections about the future.
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Or that would present an opportunity to add manpower to the project. A prime motivator for many organizations where a fixed cost isn't a limiting factor. Often, the addition of staff (and the requisite budget) is the primary motivation in organizational decision-making.
I've worked on a few tasks where we were not a part of some critical path. Sometimes, just a process improvement aimed at saving time, money and/or quality over a legacy system. Had we missed a "deadline", the only adverse impact would have
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It's easy to criticize the cost overruns and general Government bullshit that NASA is involved in, but at the end of the day, SLS made it into orbit, and Starship became part of the breathable atmosphere of South Texas, as well as some unwanted hood ornaments on peoples cars.
NASA, for better or worse, does not feel it can afford the imagery of the SLS turning into a fireball.
The idea that "commercial environment" creates an incentive of safety is so fucking blind to history that I don't really know how-
Exactly this. As much as I want Starship to succeed and think SLS is a boondoggle with the way things re looking now we will see 2-3 SLS flights before Starship is at a point where SLS will be allowed to be scrapped, and chances are those 2-3 flights, as stupidly over-expensive as they are, will hit their mission goals.
Also people forget the environment of safety for really everything aerospace, space and flight, has it's roots in NASA, the FAA and written in blood. For as much as we can point ot the fair
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Let's put this in perspective. SLS took 12 years to first launch, and will get people to space for $4 billion per launch. Starship took 3.5 years to first launch, and is expected to eventually get people to space for $10 million per launch.
I think it is safe to say that by the time Starship has been in development for 12 years, it will be launching successfully. After all, the main problem seemed to be that there wasn't a launchpad that could handle that much thrust, so the launch kicked rocks into the v
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Why are we measuring years? That's a bizarre measure for this.
Let's just do a full accounting while we're here.
SLS took about 12 years and $23B to get us a successful launch.
Starship is going on 4 years of development, $6-$7B in total funding, and no successful launches, but a few very spectacular fireballs.
As mentioned previously, fireballs are worse than bad for optics for NASA, they're a death sentence.
Ultimately, we can expect Starship to come in at around 5-6 years, and ~$10-12B in cost. So let -
FTFY. While SpaceX has a good track record on launch costs, it's a little early to count the Starship chickens.
Any per launch cost estimate runs afoul of the Accountant's Koan: when are fixed costs variable and variable costs fixed? The answer is when they're *unit* costs. In other words the amount of fixed costs you need to amortize against each launch goes up if you have fewer launches than expected. That's one reason (there were others like requirements inflation) that the Space Shuttle never achi
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It's easy to criticize Jeffrey Dahmer for being a cannibal. That doesn't make it *wrong*.
The SLS architecture was intended to eliminate program risks by re-using proven designs, even refurbishing old hardware. If this were a radical new clean-sheet design, cost and schedule overruns would be a regretable but unavoidable. But with a design which is chosen to be low risk, cost overruns and missed milestones are a failure to meet some of the program's key goals.
SLS is a low-risk program that is performing fi
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And witticisms don't make it right.
Apollo was built on nearly entirely cost-plus contracting.
I appreciate that you agree with the current Florida Man heading NASA, but it doesn't make your hypothesis correct.
Nor does my demonstration that its historicity is non-existent prove that it's wrong, though.
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Nasa still does unmanned missions well and should stick to that. Also, Virgin Orbit order what they called themselves filled for bankruptcy.
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This is the history of US government military/technological projects in a nutshell. There is no incentive to control costs and management fails to manage. The whole project is pretty much a boondoggle. The original moon project was essentially a publicity stunt. The Soviet Union was making propaganda points with its space program and the US government needed something to trump that. This does not appear to be anything different.
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The whole point was to speed the process by using technology we already had experience manufacturing. Solid rocket boosters, Space shuttle tank, Space shuttle engines. Somewhere we lost that point, even though we are using that technology, we don't seem to be able to cut down the development time. Did we lose the knowledge somewhere along the way?
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We have spent more time and money not making this happen than it took for the original Space Shuttle program to happen.
Now, for Saturn, NASA's budget was something like 4% of then-GDP. A whole lot of money was spent sending men to the Moon. But apparently we have lost knowlege and skill from both programs. This is part of the reason that the US keeps building things like aircraft carriers, because if we ever stop building them, it will be much, much more difficult to start building them again as we lose
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The fallacy of experience. Experience dies with those who have the experience. The shuttle program was suspended so long ago that no one with experience remains, and because it was suspended, the experience was not passed down to ensuing generations.
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NASA's true mission remains spreading tax dollars to as many Congressional districts as possible while subsidizing defense contractors. Nothing new here.
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There is also an incentive to wildly underestimate budgets when proposing to do govt projects. If you give an honest estimate, you won't get the project. If you lie, you get it, then get the money for the cost overruns as well. If it works, no one remembers the overruns - think JWST - embarrassingly over -budget, but now a great success. If JWST had given a realistic estimate initially, some other project would have been funded.
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And letting it explode because you didn't spend enough money. Measure twice cut once.
And yes we do waste a bit of money on these kind of programs. That's on purpose. If you cleaned up all that government "waste" multiple State economies would collapse. This is how we do socialism in America because just guaranteeing things like food, shelter, healthcare and education is too much for us. So we come up with incredibly complex Rube Goldberg machines to accomplish the same task only much worse and with a lo
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You seem to think that bureaucracy is merely a government thing.
I can assure you that bureaucracy exists in the corporate world too, and it can perpetuate for a long time if the company doesn't spend the alternate budget to continually self-examine to weed it out.
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Musk will have an hotel and a gas station going on the moon before these bozos get their act together.
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Musk having a gas station is a bit ironic.
Anyways, who do you think will order the hotel and gas station? There is no money to be made doing that, there is however scientific value in getting a presence on the moon. And the ones who will finance that will be, of course, NASA (and other space agencies). NASA will also pay for the launch, most likely at a premium.
NASA is aware of its shortcomings, that's why they are supporting SpaceX. In fact, if it wasn't for NASA, SpaceX would have been bankrupt before Fal
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"Musk having a gas station is a bit ironic."
It's for Leisure Suit Larry, it has the chicken game.
"Anyways, who do you think will order the hotel and gas station? There is no money to be made doing that, "
People pay 50 million to get 300km up, for 380.000km, it will bring WAY more.
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What is 100x more ironic than that is Musk endorsing and support DeSantis.
Beyond ironic, painful for those of us who expect better of him.
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Why? Elon is a hero to guys like him, and vice versa.
I figured him out at "pedo guy", which I admit was kind of late, but you still haven't? Get with the program, feller.
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That particular utterance was only one of many that can be considered, to put it most charitably, "unfortunate." I have for much longer time than that been writing that Musk is is own worst enemy when it comes to PR.
But when you are a CEO that has turned in ROI results to the degree he has you get a lot of latitude for personal foibles.
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Prosperity theology is not a sustainable substitute for integrity.
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I don't believe Musk has said he supports DeSantis for president, although last year he said he would if DeSantis runs.
Basically what Musk has done is given DeSantis a platform where he will not be censored, for example the way ABC censored RFK, jr. I'm pretty sure Musk would welcome Biden coming on the same way.
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It's one thing to offer a candidate a platform and another to appear next to said candidate on the platform. It's doing anything and everything to endorse besides just saying it.
I'm sure Musk will say he would host Biden the same but his actions and the people he engages and surrounds himself with will make that offer seem very bad faith and disingenuous if not like an outright trap.
Musks veneer of neutrality was stopped off a while ago and frankly I prefer him to just be honest with his beliefs. Don't pr
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HUMANS going to the moon is not worth the money for its scientific value, ditto for other planets. It's all about propaganda and fun. Rather expensive fun.
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Maybe. Falcon is a great launch system. Maybe BFR will be as well - but it isn't yet. We'll have to wait and see for a launch / recovery.
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Despite being a long-time space fan, I've never been able to work up any enthusiasm for this project. With such an out-dated and overly expensive design for such a long-term project, it is bound to scrapped by Congress at some point. And that's despite costing a lot less than various tax cuts given to corporations and the rich, or being absolutely dwarfed by the military budget. Space is really hard and expensive, but I fear that in this neoliberal era of endless austerity measures, Congress just won't have the will to fund such a high-profile science project for long enough.
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Watch how excited you'll be when they are actually up there. I think the people that crafted this understand politics. The problem with NASA in the 1970s was...who gets excited about having a reusable spacecraft that is stuck in LEO, or a space station in LEO? No one, that's who. They had political capital and squandered it on that rather than aiming for Mars. Hopefully, this time they get the picture.
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Yeah a 6 trillion dollar annual spend and 32 trillion in debt just screams austerity.
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Austerity isn't just a matter of dollars-in/dollars-out but what we do with those dollars. Even today we see things like SNAP getting cut back but guaranteed increases for the military and people negotiating to reduce the size of the IRS which is a measure that actually increases the debt. It's maddness.
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That's hilarious but, I think you might have been serious. Let me laugh harder!...it's not liberals who are pushing "austerity measures", which is the approved politically-correct conservative phrase for "giving government riches to the rich people who so desperately need the charity".
Don't say "woke"! Stay asleep, little sheep.
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In this instance NASA is forced into the worst of both worlds, they’re forced to outsource to large companies with a history of fleecing them and their management are too timid to do it accept failure themselves. This outsourced gouging is done with the support of the political class. Government can actually do this internally, or at the very least outsource smaller lower risk chunks to industry on fixed price contracts and do integration the,selves. However they’re actually encouraged to bundle the whole lot and go through big players in spite of the poor track record. An analysis of Government projects internationally found that larger contracts were more likely to fail than smaller contracts but also contracts with larger entities were more likely to fail than smaller ones. Large companies don’t care if one of their many projects fail but smaller companies need to make that big project work no matter what.
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Forced to outsource without any apparent penalties or enforcement for missed deadlines.
I mean, the reason why SpaceX is ahead here is because every failed launch is an existential threat. It's not because the government is inherently bad at managing projects or whatever, it's because they literally can't fail. They'll also never run out of money. Despite posturing on budgetary concerns, no Republican is gonna turn off the money taps when it comes to contracts that fund military companies.
The government can'
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Just for the VA computer Oracle is projected to increase the price from $16 billion to $50 billion, according to military.com.
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The project has been funded, and directed to perform, in a way to keep money flowing into the states of important Senators. No wonder it is over budget and behind schedule.
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I was recently watching HBO's series "From the Earth to the Moon", which is great, btw, and I remember in the first episode one of the top administrators saying "If we had gotten Shepard up before Gagarin it would be over. We wouldn't be talking about going to the moon for another 20 years." Well, what if that delay was intentional in order to keep America motivated? Right now, there's very little motivation for NASA to get the lead out. They can just keep moving at a snail's pace and keep people employ
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Since the projects goal was to steer money to specific districts and contractors, a lot of cost overruns and delays would seem to be an expected feature of the system, not a bug. The intent of this specific project was never really to put anything on the moon, and in fact it actually working and doing so would be ultimately self-defeating.
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According to space.com, the cost for an Artemis/SLS launch is estimated to be about $4B. One launch. No reusable parts.
A SpaceX Starship cost target is $1M (that is M not B) per launch. Almost all reused. As per the same space.com article. Those numbers are corroborated elsewhere.
So a 4,000 to 1 cost comparison ratio. Even if you stipulate that Musk is off in his estimates by 100x that is still a 400 to 1 cost advantage.
Who the hell calls THAT "competition?"
It isn't.
What the "competing
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you might have had a point but the engineers at SpaceX are such hyperfocused autists they didn't consider proper flame trenches and water deluge system for Starship, and so damaged their craft and endangered a town with chunks of concrete raining out of the sky.
In short, they're like kids with a high school science project that burned themselves and set the home on fire.
Maybe they can't make a serious lanuch system, maybe their toys remain toys.
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Each starshp launch will cost more than $100M for foreseeable future anyway, even if they succeed in something that gets to orbit without doing the Sodom and Gomorrah thing, your investor / marketing hype number is utter BS
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Well actually they already DID have designed a better launchpad, it just wasn't ready for this launch, and otherwise the launch would have been postponed for much much longer, as also other regulatory blocks would have come up. Sometimes you just have to do it, no matter the consequences, and this launch provided so much new extra data.
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NASA has a long history of disorganization and money mismanagement. There was even a book about it called the title of this post.
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It’ll just collapse the USA, USD and NASA.
olde saying - “ What would a Farmer do if you gave him a million dollars?”
“ He’d Farm until it was all gone” -
Just shut the SLS down, cut your losses. The SLS is already an ancient rocket. Just put the money towards SpaceX, Blue Origin and other commercial rocket companies. Help them with easier setting up their rocket factories/test areas. The companies responsible for SLS have always been known for their costs black holes and never delivered anything on time or around the budget. SLS is not needed as SpaceX and Blue Origin already are well on their way of their big rockets that can lift even way more cargo for a
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That may be NASA's goals, but pretty sure their contractors would favor the opposite for profits and job security -- so, duh, it's going to cost more and take longer./cynical
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