No One Cares What The ISS Really Cost Any More – Including NASA
China wants to mine the moon for ‘space gold’, PBS NewsHour
“At a cost of more than $150 billion, the International Space Station is the most expensive object ever built. This price tag is more than double the combined costs of China’s Three Gorges Dam, Boston’s Big Dig and the Chunnel. But as noted by CNN, funding for the International Space Station may run out in the early 2020s.”
Keith’s note: $150 billion? Where did that number come from? The cost reference is a Wikipedia article that cites a 2010 post on some website called “Zidbits” (that says ISS cost $160 billion) and a 2010 SpaceReview article by some french journalist who cites old NASA budget charts and cost estimates from other news stories.The Wikipedia article has separate numbers for ISS construction and shuttle flights that simply do not jive in any mathematical way with what NASA OIG says – they overstate NASA’s costs by $50 billion when compared to a more recent NASA OIG report – that’s a 33% difference in the overall cost.
Wikipedia quotes these Zidbits guys as saying that the ISS is the “most expensive object ever built”. Since Wikipedia is the default standard here, lets use it again to see what the U.S. Interstate Highway system cost – it is one large, interconnected object, yes? Bingo: “In 2006, the cost of construction had been estimated at about $425 billion (equivalent to $498 billion in 2014”. So much for that ISS claim.
According to this article that starts off with a discussion of NASA’s ISS costs and prohibition of working with China, the author “Vikram Mansharamani is a lecturer in the Program on Ethics, Politics & Economics at Yale University and a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.” So … being an obviously very smart economics kind of guy, one would assume that he uses real numbers with citations, cross references, etc. Guess again (see below). This easily findable (via Google) recent NASA OIG report gives a very clear estimate of U.S. ISS costs:
Final Memorandum, Audit of NASA’s Management of International Space Station Operations and Maintenance Contracts (IG-15-021; A-14-023-00), Juy 15, 2015
“The United States has invested almost $78 billion in the International Space Station (ISS or Station) over the last 21 years, and going forward, NASA plans to spend between $3 and $4 billion annually to maintain and operate the Station, including transportation for crew and cargo. Footnote: This investment includes $46.7 billion for construction and Program costs through 2014, plus $30.7 billion for 37 supporting Space Shuttle flights, the last of which took place in July 2011.”
This article by Mansharamani appears on the PBS NewsHour website as well as on Fortune magazine’s website. You’d think that someone would be checking these numbers before posting these articles. Wikipedia? Really? Then again, this is the Internet – and its really not this guy’s fault since crazy numbers about the cost of the ISS have been floating around the Internet for years. NASA has never thought of trying to slap them down and put the cost estimates out for all to see. Still there are real numbers to be found if you use Google.
Yet even when the NASA OIG does provide accurate cost estimates, NASA does nothing to openly promulgate these figures to the media, academia, or the public at large. If professional economists just take these Internet numbers as established fact due to their frequency of mention on the Internet, what other things about NASA are simply floating around out there that are simply inaccurate? You’d think NASA would be worried about this as they do their #JourneyToMars hype with an imaginary “notional” budget run out given that it is certain to cost much more than ISS. Guess again.
Now that he has been alerted to this Mansharamani seems to be honestly off checking things and hopefully contemplating a revision. Good for him. If only NASA spent a little more time telling its story better urban space myths like this might just be a little less common and the #JourneyToMars might just be a tad more feasible. Also, instead of having 30 year career civil servants (who have never run a business) talking as if they were experts on how business works, maybe they should invite guys like Mansharamani in to teach them about the real world.
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I find it is always good to have some references points when discussing costs.
Three Gorges Dam $28 billion
http://money.cnn.com/galler…
Boston’s big dig $24 billlion
http://www.boston.com/cars/…
The Chunnel cost 12 billion pounds, about $17 billion dollars.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…
So that is a total of $64 billion for the three of them.
But these aren’t the most expensive civil engineering projects, but are actually fairly modest ones. For reference, the most expensive construction project is one few Americans have heard of, the Kashagan Project in Kazakhstan run by a consortium of KazMunayGas, Eni, Shell, Exxon, Total, ConocoPhillips, INPEX. It comes in at an estimated $116 billion. The Three Gorges Dam only ranks number 10 on the list in terms of costs for an energy project. And yes, this also shows private industry would be able to raise the money needed for lunar development or SBSP if an economic case is made for it. Indeed, private industry has access to a lot more money that NASA ever will have.
But these costs for are construction programs. A better reference point would be to use a high tech aerospace program. The F-35 is a good one to use at $400 billion
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/…
Or for a more reasonable program, the F-22 Raptor which cost $74 billion
http://www.wired.com/2011/1…
So really, the ISS isn’t that far out of line with other government aerospace programs.
Also as a final reference, the World Gross Product for 2014 was around $78 Trillion, roughly a 1,000 times the cost of the ISS. Average the ISS cost over 21 years and the human race used less than .01 of 1 percent of its wealth to build the ISS.
That article brought up Helium-3 as the “Moon Gold”. *Sigh*, not again.
Although if you wanted to go looking for actual gold on the Moon, I suppose you could drop landers in the various maria and some impact craters to drill down into the regolith. Maybe you’ll find something left by a metal-rich impactor, or kicked up from down below back when the Moon still had volcanic eruptions.
Avatar had Unobtanium, so I suppose its OK.
Core before Avatar.
Cheers
What most folks don’t realize is that He3 is already being produced on Earth as a by product from tritium decay.
http://science.energy.gov/n…
“Each year, thousands of liters of 3He gas are made available to crucial applications including government research, national security activities, and medical diagnostic procedures.”
Before mining the Moon for it you really need to do a cost benefit relative to increasing production from sources on Earth.
The lunar helium-3 myth was originated in response to a challange to find something valuable on the Moon. In reality 3He is readibly available on Earth and thus such schemes are unrealistic, but we space enthusiasts want a simple answer. As to China, although such myths may circulate there as well the real motivations for China’s space activities are simper, to build national pride, to showcase their commercial technical capabilities, and to show they have “joined the club” of the world’s leading nations.
In 1998, GAO estimated the Space Station life-cycle cost to be ~$100B (US cost, not incl foreign). An updated estimate in the range of $150B seems very plausible, especially given what look like very low estimated ops costs. Anyway you slice it, ISS has, and continues to, cost a ton of money; and with that comes a significant “opportunity cost”.
“seems plausable” – or is actually true. Try reading the 2015 OIG report.
The ‘new’ math doesn’t check out even superficially. For the last eight years, STS program only existed for the sole purpose: completing the ISS. The program budget was 4-5 billion. With $40B coming from that alone, there is no way the total will end up at $78.
But hey, accounting is a creative art
Wasn’t a huge part of the high costs for the ISS because we were saddled with utilzing the space shuttle for transporting parts?
I can not imagine that a Bigelow facility will have anywhere near the cost per cubic foot of space as the ISS cost.
It doesn’t, but even better NASA doesn’t need to buy one, it could just lease it. Bigelow Aerospace is offering a lease for 1/3 of the BA330 for $25 million for two months.
http://www.nasaspaceflight….
Three BA330 have about the same usable volume as the ISS (although capable of supporting 18 astronauts). So doing the math ($25 million X 9) means NASA could lease the equivalent ISS volume for $225 for 2 months or $1.35 billion a year about half the annual budget for ISS. Bigelow Aerospace also supplies the crew to keep the ISS operating so any astronauts sent would be able to spend most of their time doing research, unlike astronauts on the ISS. Add in the Dragon flights and NASA would be saving nearly half their annual budget renting from Bigelow Aerospace instead continuing to operate the ISS. I suspect that with such an anchor lease BA would even let NASA place their logo on it 🙂
Of course if NASA only wants a six person station the costs would be reduced to one third, or only $450 million a year.
“Saddled”? ISS would not exist without STS.
That would be bull .. the russians managed to build one without a shuttle. Are you saying American aerospace contractors and engineers are to stupid to build a station without a shuttle?
No I’m not saying that at all. Could you image if the Saturn V was still around and you could launch multiple Skylab modules and link them together. Unfortunately, size does matter with rockets. Mir was much smaller than ISS. The Russian segments on ISS are also much smaller than those carried up by shuttle. The payload bays of the shuttle could carry up much larger modules than any rocket can currently carry.
So could a station be built… sure, but it would not have modules as large as the ones on ISS. Hopefully BEAM will change that.
A big advantage of the Shuttle is that it brought construction crews (and cranes) to the worksite, not just hardware. This was critical as the ISS design was very dependent on EVA, much more so than the Russian segment. Pro and con to each method but that was the way the U.S. segment of ISS was designed.
Shuttle crews could train on their specific upcoming tasks right up to a few days before launch. Whereas expedition astronauts received more general training in EVA tasks as well as a few specific tasks that were expected to possibly come up during their months onboard. This allowed for very efficient EVA work by the Shuttle crews, as well as flexibility in case of schedule changes or modifications to the tasks.
This also allowed the expedition crews to continue with their daily activities while the visiting Shuttle crew did the construction work. Sure there was some disruption, and station residents often assisted with EVA prep, etc. However the impact was much less than if station crews had to conduct all of the needed EVA’s themselves.
Even with all of this efficiency it took over 1,000 hours of EVA to build ISS. Without the Shuttle it would have taken much longer, perhaps may even have been nearly impossible. Yes they could have designed it differently so as not to require as much EVA, but that could have impacted the ultimate design. Again there’s pro and con and it’s something that future planners I’m sure will be keeping in mind when designing spacecraft or habitats which require assembly in orbit.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comic…
Thanks for interrupting the cycle Keith
As someone writing a book that competes, at least in some ways, with data available on the web, I appreciate this more than I can say. In my research (into an admittedly prosaic topic compared to the heady material discussed herein) I’ve found countless apocryphal assumptions and citations.
LeFleur has a good set of ISS cost data, NASA budget graph for context, inflation and real year, Shuttle flights included or not, over at:
http://www.thespacereview.c…
As long as we are discussing big space projects I would like to add one other reference point in terms of the relationship between space spending and the global economy to put ISS costs into perspective, as well as space spending.
Black Rock is the world’s largest investment fund, with $4.3 Trillion in investments. That is Trillion with a “T”. Given the cost of the ISS at $78 billion, that is enough money to build 55 additional ones. Or 226 times as much as NASA’s annual budget. And there are other funds in the Trillion dollar class. Saudi Arabia just announced a $2 Trillion Dollar fund to move beyond oil as their revenue source. Really, folks have got to stop thinking of space in terms of the 1960’s when a billion dollars was actually a large sum of money. It isn’t really in today’s business world.
http://fortune.com/2014/07/…
BlackRock: The $4.3 trillion force
Yes but……. when you throw in the construction and ongoing costs of the Lincoln Tunnel it is the most expensive single object built in America or at least second to none:)
It depends. One study pegged shuttle alone at 209B in 2010 $ so you have to exclude development costs and adjust for the time phasing to arrive at the lower estimate. http://www.space.com/12166-…
100 billion vs 1M dollars…vs the alternatives….
https://youtu.be/cKKHSAE1gI…