Good lord. GAO says that the SLS/Orion stacks used in Artemis are going to cost $4.1 billion a piece (PDF p. 29), exclusive of development costs. That’s basically equivalent to the entire cost of Europa Clipper. Mindboggling.
At the end of the program, shuttle missions were still costing nearly half a billion. The more I think about it, the less manned missions make sense. What are we doing?
This is SLS more than manned though. Crew Dragon is something like $225 million per launch, and Starliner is like $350 million.
imho it’s been clear for a while that space exploration with unmanned AI is going to be the smart way to go. Just a huge money sink trying to keep apes up into space. I guess they made space tacos tho, that’s cool.
Maybe I’m not following this closely enough. SLS has capability beyond LEO. NASA at least says they’re going to the moon. There’s going to be huge cost differences if you want to do that.
SpaceX’s R&D budget for its Moon (and beyond) capable rocket is around the same price as a single SLS launch because SLS is a jobs program first and a space program second.
At this point all I can say about Super Heavy is lots a luck. At least jobs+space is a proven way to program success.
SLS was supposed to launch in 2016! It’s going to be made obsolete by a rocket that was conceived, developed and built in the window between when it was supposed to be operational and when it actually makes it. I guess it was successful at the jobs part though.
Good for them if that happens. One setback and that sentence might need some revision.
On a small scale, it was once part of my job to estimate hours and costs for aerospace projects. I was terrible. But I’m not ready to concede Musk is any better. (A few months ago he was saying he could get to the moon before 2024. Come on.)
Anyway I think the costs are too large and the benefits too small for these projects. Incremental improvements can’t change that.
What do you mean by “these projects” though? SLS is (was supposed to be) a launch vehicle for unmanned missions too, but it was insanely bad in that role too. Europa Clipper was supposed to launch on it, except it wasn’t going to be ready, it was too expensive, and its launch vibrations were so extreme they would destroy the payload.
Planetary defense sounds like something the Space Force should be handling, but w/e.
https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-first-planetary-defense-mission-will-nudge-asteroid
Manned missions. The advantages over robots are nil for now and the foreseeable future.
I don’t think we have the will to sustain an outpost on the moon or Mars. Look at what happened after Apollo. We’ve barely managed to keep ISS. If you really want to do that kind of thing you have to establish a constituency. That’s the STS approach. It’s expensive and slow and doesn’t always work. But I don’t think the space geek community is nearly heavily enough invested in SpaceEx et al. programs to provide real support when the going gets tough, which it will. At some point Musk/Bezos/Branson just decide, well we’ve been to space, meh, we don’t need the headache, see ya.
And what’s the point of sending people to space anyway? A frequently mentioned benefit of ISS is supposed to be that we learn about the effects of long term stays in space. But we already know it’s an extremely harsh environment. At best we get a better understanding of how and after how long it will kill us.
Other benefits are that humans can make decisions and are more flexible. Well, it might not be optimal but we can transmit our decisions to robots. The additional cost to keep the flexible human alive long enough to make a close-up decision that doesn’t matter except to a small number of people doesn’t make sense to me. It used to because I was one of those people (I had aerospace job at a company that does STS kinds of projects) but my perspective is different now.
I see it might be confusing I’m not really distinguishing program/projects from mission types. Maybe that’s from the experience of being sold this stuff because that’s what people do if they’re pushing a program (space) or a project (STS/Super Heavy) or a mission (moon landing). That’s how we got the shuttle and Hubble, for example. Individually, they probably wouldn’t have gotten done.
I’m not sure I particularly disagree with any of this, but I do think the problems with SLS are pretty much orthogonal to the manned vs robotic exploration question. SLS sucks for both because it’s vastly too expensive. If SpaceX or Relativity or Rocket Lab can put 100 tons of stuff in orbit for a reasonable cost, it completely changes the game for robotic exploration at the same time it’s making ambitious manned projects at least superficially plausible.
I don’t think I disagree that much with what you’re saying either. Focusing on the rockets, it’s just that as far as SLS competitors are concerned, their success, including low cost claims, is TBD. I’m not an an optimist.
Again, I’m not following closely but serious issues with SLS, beyond price, would not surprise me. It would be consistent with the development history of similarly large systems. It’s possible NASA eventually has to say uncle. (I couldn’t track the changes to proposed shuttle replacements even when I was working in aerospace.) I guess Im really just saying this is hard, really hard, and I doubt these shiny new operations are that much better in terms of expected value, if you could fairly calculate it.
Oh man, I’ve lost plenty of spaceships in Kerbal Space Program by releasing the clamp at the wrong time.
