NASA Still Has No Idea What a SLS Launch Will Cost
How much will SLS and Orion cost to fly? Finally some answers, Ars Technica
“My top number for Orion, SLS, and the ground systems that support it is $2 billion or less,” [NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development Bill] Hill told Ars. “I mean that’s my real ultimate goal. We were running at about three-plus, 3.6 billion [dollars] during the latter days of space shuttle. Of course, there again, we were flying six or seven missions. I think we’re actually going to have to get to less than that.” Ars has learned that the agency’s ultimate goal for annual production and operations costs is about $1.5 billion. … Production and operations costs – P&O in NASA’s acronym laden jargon – of $2 billion or less would leave a significant amount of money within NASA’s budget for human missions to the vicinity of the Moon, to its surface, or eventually crewed missions to Mars. In fiscal year 2016, NASA received $3.7 billion for exploration systems development, essentially the SLS, Orion, and ground systems budget. The number is likely to grow to $4 billion before the decade’s end. If it could eventually spend half of that on deep space habitats, landers, surface living quarters, and myriad other systems, the agency could have the beginnings of a viable program in deep space.”
Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Annual Report 2015, earlier post
“In October 2015, NASA published what it called “a detailed outline” of its next steps in getting to the Red Planet. Unfortunately, the level of detail in the report, NASA’s Journey to Mars: Pioneering the Next Steps in Space Exploration, does not really validate whether NASA would be capable of achieving such an ambitious objective in a reasonable time period, with realistically attainable technologies, and with budgetary requirements that are consistent with the current economic environment.”
Double GAO Reports: SLS and Orion Cost and Risk Estimates Are Still Unreliable
“… the SLS program has not positioned itself well to provide accurate assessments of core stage progress – including forecasting impending schedule delays, cost overruns, and anticipated costs at completion – because at the time of our review it did not anticipate having the baseline to support full reporting on the core stage contract until summer 2016 – some 4.5 years after NASA awarded the contract.”
– GAO Finds NASA SLS Costs Not Credible, earlier post
– NASA Employs Faith-Based Funding Approach For SLS, earlier post
– NASA Has Three Different Launch Dates for Humans on SLS, earlier post
– Earlier SLS/Orion posts
Senator Shelby – I remember. Remember when we talking in Russell and you assured us that SLS would be more cost effective than shuttle? I do. It was said in 2011 and I will say it now – we have no idea how much per launch this sucker is. We get three flights max.
Enjoying watching SLS insiders squirm as the pressure mounts.
…but in the meantime – a question for you and your staff Senator Shelby (and Senator Nelson too (after all NASA is bipartisan)): What if we would have taken all that SLS funding and dumped it into something that the private sector cannot do? Examples include:
-Depots
-Massive nuclear reactors (gigawatt class)
-Long duration habitats
Could not the workforce at MSFC, JSC, and KSC solved these problems instead?
Your history will accurately reflect your decisions.
Working out the cost is easy, it’s there in the budget, divided by the number of launches.
Okay, it gets harder when you want to work out the additional costs for adding launches, or the “savings” from skipping/delaying launches. But the basics are pretty easy.
SLS/Orion are pulling in more than $3.7b/yr and that will increase over the next decade. But if I average that back to $3b/yr over the length of the program (to save having to dig up actual past numbers and future projections), you have just under $50 billion from program inception until 2027. I pick 2027 for the end-date because that’s when the first batch of new engines are due to be delivered, which adds the capacity for one additional flight beyond the existing 16 engines. So a maximum of five possible flights.
Hence $10 billion per flight. Easy.
However, that’s treating SLS and Orion as a single gestalt entity. If you split the costs 60/40 between SLS & Orion, that’s $30b for SLS and $20b for Orion. I believe only three Orion capsules will be built by 2027, including the semi-functional 2018/2019 demo. That gives you $6b for the launch of a cargo-mode SLS-70. And an additional $6b-plus per capsule.
So $12b-plus for each launch of Orion.
$6b for a payload-only mission, not including the cost of the payload.
While I’m playing with numbers…
The figure that SpaceX gives for a launch of the FH is around $90m. But that’s the reusable mode, which has about a third the capacity as the fully expendable mode. Multiplying linearly, and that’s $270m for a fully expendable 50 tonnes to LEO launch. (Note, when I offered that figure in a previous thread, many jumped on me, claiming you can’t multiply the costs linearly by capacity. Which is fair enough, but $90m and one-third are the only numbers I have to go on. And you’ll soon see, it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna round up to $300m.)
So, assuming an Oberth efficiency loss in splitting the payload, lets say it takes two 50 tonne launches to EOR to match SLS’s 70 tonnes in direct throw. (**) However, as none of the payloads proposed for SLS are over 20 tonnes, there’s no actual capacity limit for FH. It’s just that you need to separate the BEO throw-engine from the payload-launch.
** (50 tonnes and 70 tonnes are the LEO capacity of each system. Obviously SLS can’t put 70 tonnes into BEO.)
Dragon V2 is supposed to be able to handle re-entry from direct lunar return. But let’s say the radiation, comms and life-support aren’t up to the task. You need to do an Apollo-13 type split where you live in another module and just use the capsule for launch and re-entry.
Bigelow has listed a lease price for a BA-330 at $25m for 1/3rd the space for 60 days. Adding linearly again, that’s just under half a $billion for the whole BA-330-based station per year. Arbitrarily double it for the whole station costs and that’s a $billion for a BA-330 and its associated power/thermal/ECLSS-hardware. (That figure obviously includes Bigelow’s launch and set-up costs to get the station on-orbit, but I’ll ignore that. The difference can cover the extra rad-hardening needed to throw BA-330 through the Van Allen belts.)
BA-hab module: $1b.
Launch price for BA-hab module: $300m.
Throw engine: ???
Launch price for throw engine: $300m.
Additional launch of F9/Dragon V2 & crew: Arbitrary $150m. ($60m launch, $60m capsule, plus a bit for fun).
Worst case mission costs, $1.8 billion plus the cost of the throw engine.
Assuming the throw engine costs as much to develop and build (per unit) as the rest of the mission put together, that’s $3.6 billion for an EM-2 like mission. Verses $12b for SLS/Orion. Or about 30%.
Now there’s a lot of areas where you could make savings. It’s doubtful that it would cost that much to make a simple throw-engine. It’s likely that you’d change the mission architecture to make the BA-hab reusable instead of throwing away one every mission.
But it’s more likely that Dragon could be modded to handle LEO-to-cis-Lunar for less than the cost of adding an entire BA-hab for each flight, so instead you add a much smaller ECLSS/comms module to the Dragon trunk, along with an extra foot of radiation shielding inside the capsule. In that case, you could probably launch Dragon+crew directly on FH, especially with the Raptor-based upperstage they are working on.
That’s a single, let’s say, $400m launch of FH-Raptor, with a $100m BEO-Dragon.
Or $500m per mission. Or 4% of the price of an SLS/Orion mission.
However, if you do develop that BEO throw-engine which can dock with a separately-launched payload in LEO, that gives you a very useful tool for other lunar and BEO missions. It means that the proposed SLS-launched Europa mission could be launched of its fast-flight trajectory even on FH. You simply need two launches. Say $600m, plus $200m for the throw-engine, instead of $6 billion for SLS-cargo. Or 13% of the launch costs. That frees up a potential $5b extra for the probe/lander itself.
Only quibble I noticed: you’ve included the development costs of SLS into calculation of per flight cost, but not done so on FH; and admittedly as it’s not a direct cost to the government, you are correct, but does it does skew the 4% figure?
“it’s not a direct cost to the government”
[edit: In case this came across as snarky to Michael, I was just saying “yes, that one.”
The only government cost for FH is the USAF’s apparent assistance with the development of Raptor, as part of their domestic engine development support. But this is intended to deliver the more powerful upperstage to the USAF for national security payloads, so I don’t consider it applicable. (Anyway, I did add an arbitrary $100m unit cost to FH-RUS, which should more than cover the USAF input.)
However, I probably should have added the COTS and CC costs to the unit price of Dragon. But that doesn’t change my argument by much. Compared to SLS/Orion funding, those two programs are a rounding-off error. And if I add “costs via another program”, I should probably include some Constellation costs to SLS/Orion for the prior work done on Orion, the SRBs, and the ground infrastructure.
Likewise, you can’t add in prior costs like FASTRAC and PICA without adding in the prior development costs of the Shuttle hardware being recycled for SLS. And IMO, at that point you’re just being silly.
My comparison was meant to be an “all other things being equal”.]
[[ I also started counting from 2011. That’s when the SLS program was meaningfully created. The same conclusion holds even when you start counting in 2018. (Giving a year and a bit of funding to close out the existing SLS/Orion program before switching.)]]
[[[ I could have also thrown in some date estimates. Clearly F9/D2 will fly crew before Orion. FH will launch a bit before SLS, but will fly regularly long before SLS’s second flight; and will likely have been superseded by SpaceX’s next shiny-thing before SLS sees its first new engines.]]]
“it’s not a direct cost to the government”
Agreed. The SLS supporters can whine about this all they want. But, at the end of the day according to the accountants, it is the total cost to the US taxpayer that matters.
Thanks for actually thinking out what we’ve all been talking about for quite awhile. Your exercise shows that the differences in costs are nearly an order of magnitude (and sometimes more).
The government doesn’t care how SpaceX paid for development of Falcon Heavy. When they buy a Falcon Heavy launch, they pay only for the launch. The details are left to SpaceX.
Yes, when calculating SLS costs, you need to include the full cost to the taxpayer. The simplest, and most fair IMHO, way to do this is take the total program cost and divide by the total number of launches. So, we won’t really know for sure how much each flight cost until the end of the program. But we can surely guess based on the number of SSMEs turned into RS-25s (16 total which is only four launches) plus any planned new RS-25s which are actually being paid for.
Simple math often tells a lot. Good thoughts there.
Time to do a cost-plus study on whether it will meet cost projections!
More seriously, what Paul said above.
I am curious, but has anyone ever figured out what the cost of a Shuttle Launch was? Not the full program costs, but simply the cost of an additional shuttle launch.
Given that, it is probably not surprising they have no idea what the SLS will cost, either in real cash costs or in terms of accounting costs.
The shuttle program cost about 100 billion, for 135 flights. $750 million/flight is a rom.
But there were a lot of expenses included in the Shuttle budget like construction and maintenance of KSC facilities, maintaining engineering and operations work forces at the different NASA and contractor centers who did not neccesarly100% support the Shuttle flights and the $750 million number also including amortization of the vehicle design and development costs. So some people have said a more reasonable estimate of Shuttle cost per flight is closer to $450 million. And still others have said that you really cannot include the entire workforce in the costs, and only the marginal cost per flight should be considered, something more like $150 million per flight.
Despite the idea that NASA individuals want desperately to launch people to the planets, the NASA institution has a problem: the institution feels they must distribute their meager funds as widely as possible. The institution also feels the going rate for any program is $3 billion per year. Those 2 factors take precedence over all others.
The fact that the spaceship and rocket take decades to develop is not an issue. The fact that by the time development is finished, the capsule will be long ago relegated to the ancient and extinct technology heap is not an issue. The fact that NASA makes essentially no progress in launching people to the planets is not an issue. The fact that ultimately the program fails to meet its purpose, is not an issue. NASA is at cross purposes with itself.
Competent leadership would have driven this problem to resolution decades ago. That is what we are missing.