![The Space Launch System rocket is seen on its launch pad, LC-39B, in Florida.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/SLS-Mar-17-2022-2546-800x534.jpg)
Trevor Mahlmann
In a brand 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 brand new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the event of the huge rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as a part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as a part of the Artemis program.
“Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable,” the brand new report states.
Poor tools to know true costs
The Government Accountability Office expressed serious concerns about NASA’s decision to not measure production costs of SLS rocket elements, including the core stages and rocket engines needed for future launches. As a substitute, 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.”
Nevertheless, the report states, these are “poor tools” for a value baseline for the SLS rocket program and can make it difficult for taxpayers to measure costs and the performance of NASA and its contractors over time. Furthermore, the report indicates that NASA has not frequently 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.
One other problem with NASA’s cost estimates is that they don’t appear to account for delays to Artemis missions. It’s probable that the Artemis II mission, a crewed flight across the Moon, will launch no sooner than 2025. The Artemis III crewed landing will likely slip to at the least 2026, if no more, with additional delays down the road. At the very least one NASA official apparently told the Government Accountability Office that these delays would don’t have any cost impacts, which seems highly improbable.
“Some NASA officials told us that changes to Artemis mission dates shouldn’t affect the SLS program’s cost estimate,” the report states. “Other officials noted that this system’s cost estimate can be expected to extend to account for the delay to the Artemis IV mission, which shifted from 2026 to 2028.”
The way to pare back unsustainable costs
NASA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that they were concerned concerning the costs of the SLS rocket.
“NASA recognizes the necessity to improve the affordability of the SLS program and is taking steps to accomplish that,” the report states. “Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials consider shall be available for its Artemis missions.”
Officials from the space agency said that they had a four-step plan to cut back costs of the SLS rocket program over time:
- Stabilize the flight schedule
- Achieve learning curve efficiencies
- Encourage innovation
- Adjust acquisition strategies to cut back cost risk
Setting aside that a few of these goals sound suspiciously like corporate speak, the report makes clear that these are aspirational goals for now. “NASA, nevertheless, has not yet identified specific program-level cost-saving goals which it hopes to attain,” the authors write. “NASA has made some progress toward implementing these strategies, nevertheless it is simply too early to completely evaluate their effect on cost.”
Can NASA really control costs?
While NASA actually deserves credit for talking concerning the excessive cost of the SLS rocket—a undeniable fact that has been identified by critics for greater than a decade but largely ignored by NASA officials and congressional leaders—it is just not in any respect clear that they are going to give you the option to manage costs. For instance, NASA recently said that it’s working with the first contractor of the SLS rocket’s foremost engines, Aerojet, to cut back the associated fee of every engine by 30 percent, all the way down to $70.5 million by the top of this decade.
Nevertheless, NASA’s inspector general, Paul Martin, said this claim was dubious. In line with Martin, when calculating the projected cost savings of the brand 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 removed from being reasonably priced in comparison with the prevailing US industrial marketplace for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for lower than $20 million. And SpaceX is looking for to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to lower than $1 million per engine.