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SLS and Orion

Burning Lots of Money Just to Recreate Apollo 8

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 27, 2017
Filed under , ,
Burning Lots of Money Just to Recreate Apollo 8

New report: NASA spends 72 cents of every SLS dollar on overhead costs, Ars Technica
“… according to a new report published by the nonpartisan think tank Center for a New American Security, NASA has spent $19 billion on rockets, first on Ares I and V, and now on the SLS. Additionally, the agency has spent $13.9 billion on the Orion spacecraft. The agency hopes to finally fly its first crewed mission with the new vehicles in 2021. If it does so, the report estimates the agency will have spent $43 billion before that first flight, essentially a reprise of the Apollo 8 mission around the Moon.
… The new report argues that, given these high costs, NASA should turn over the construction of rockets and spacecraft to the private sector. It buttresses this argument with a remarkable claim about the “overhead” costs associated with the NASA-led programs.”

Keith’s note: $43 billion in one dollar bills would stretch 4,166,700 miles or 17 times the distance to the Moon. Just sayin’.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

42 responses to “Burning Lots of Money Just to Recreate Apollo 8”

  1. Vladislaw says:
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    When you think about what could have been accomplished with that much funding. How much hardware could actually have already been launched.

    • Donald Barker says:
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      Hardware (especially for engineers) means nothing if there is no long-term, growing and sustainable goal in space. The past 50 years of have proven this. We are a one-and-done space culture.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        We’ll always be a “one and done” space culture if we keep throwing away all of the multi-billion dollar hardware after one use!

        Seriously, a fully expendable SLS is just stupid. Same for any other part of our beyond LEO transportation system that’s thrown away after one use.

  2. Donald Barker says:
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    So if NASA turned “over the construction of rockets and spacecraft to the private sector” then NO public funds (e.g., startup costs, technical support, etc.) should be used to help them and what ever remains of the US space program would just buy rides from the available providers. Correct?

    • Zed_WEASEL says:
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      That only applies if NASA is buying a standard service. Otherwise NASA must provide support and have insight for non-standard services. Of course most of the launch services for NASA and USAF/NRO are non-standard. Starting with vertical payload intergation for example.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        Any launch NASA buys which uses an “off the shelf” commercial launch vehicle will still be far cheaper than SLS will ever be even after NASA adds in “non-standard services”.

        • Zed_WEASEL says:
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          With the exception of the Delta IV Heavy. Which rumors have it is heading toward the $1B per launch. IIRC there is only 2 non USAF/NRO usage of the Delta IV Heavy. The boilerplate Orion EFT-1 test launch and the upcoming Solar Probe Plus mission.

    • fcrary says:
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      Not necessarily. From NASA’s side, some subsides for startup costs and some technical support could be worthwhile. Specifically, if those costs are small compared to the savings from buying rides from the resulting service providers.

      NASA gave SpaceX about $400 million to develop the Falcon 9 and Dragon. If each resupply mission costs $40 million less than a (hypothetical) NASA-internally-developed resupply mission would have, then NASA would be saving money after the tenth mission.

      • Zed_WEASEL says:
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        IIRC according to internal NASA studies. Developing the Falcon 9 equivalent launch vehicle in house was $4.0B or $1.7B on a more commercial methodology. SpaceX stated their development cost was $300M for the Falcon 9 plus $90M for the Falcon 1 precursor. Seems to me that NASA got a negative cost of $3.6B or $1.3B for the overall cost of the Falcon 9 program to begin with.

        Never mind the additional cost if NASA attempting to developed a capsule in house, which I am guessing will be at least equal to the NASA projected cost for the Falcon 9.

        According to wikipedia. SpaceX stated in 2014 that the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule development was funded by $396M from NASA and $450M from SpaceX. So appears that the cargo Dragon capsule was about $500M in development cost.

  3. Tally-ho says:
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    If they man EM-1 let’s hope it isn’t a recreation of Apollo 1.

  4. Odyssey2020 says:
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    This is even more proof that NASA Human Space Flight is just a jobs program.

  5. Michael Spencer says:
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    WHERE.IS.THE.OUTRAGE???

  6. numbers_guy101 says:
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    Umm…makes me want to get out some numbers…tomorrow.

  7. fcrary says:
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    On the other hand, $43 billion in one dollar bills is only 6e-16 times the mass of the Moon…

    Seriously, I’m not sure about 72 cents of overhead per dollar spent. The Ars Technica story (in the text, not the headline) actually says this is the fraction of “NASA-related costs” as opposed to the money going to contractors building hardware. Some of the money NASA spends internally funds useful work, not overhead. The contractors also charge overhead. So equating NASA-internal spending with overhead isn’t correct. Nor is equating money spent by the contractors with useful work.

    • MarcNBarrett says:
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      “On the other hand, $43 billion in one dollar bills is only 6e-16 times the mass of the Moon…”

      I don’t know what you mean by that. Google tells me that a $1 bill weighs about 1 gram. So $43 billion is 43 billion grams, or 43 million kg, or 43,000 metric tons. I don’t know the moon’s mass (I could ask Google, but I’m lazy) but I know it is a LOT more than 43,000 metric tons.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        the 6E-16 means 6 times ten to the minus 16th power. The mass of the moon is 7.34767309 × 10^22 kilograms so 6E-16 times this gives 4.3×10^7 kg, (4.3E7 kg) or 43,000 metric tons.

  8. Patrick Judd says:
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    So, going to the moon has no place in going to mars? We have spent about 2 weeks on the surface of the moon. That time was spread out between 6 missions and 12 moon walkers. The did simple science and collected rocks on the mid regions of the near side. Half of those people are dead and the others are elderly… I would think that learning how to build a useful habitat, living and working for weeks, then months, then years, would be a useful exercise in preparation for mars. Just as many of you balk at the danger and waste this “replay of Apollo 8” represents,I view running off to Mars for years w/o a good working understanding of whats involved is foolhardy at best. The moon is 3 days away from earth. Mars is years away,included in that s a 20 min lag in communications… So practicing in our own backyard is the way to go…

    • fcrary says:
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      The real issue is what, exactly, we need to learn. If you want to do useful, scientific field work on Earth, and you have never gone hiking or slept in​ a tent, there are definitely things you need to learn. You can learn some of those things by spending a month in the field in the Mojave, and if you make a serious mistake, help is close at hand. But it wouldn’t really teach you the right thing for field work on the Antarctic plateau. Some of the right things, but very far from all of them. So, when it comes to the Moon as a step towards Mars, a reasonable question is how similar the lessons and the environment would be. A sizable fraction of the people who have looked at the details think the answer is, “not very.”

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        The lessons won’t be at all similar. The conditions are Mars are vastly different than the moon. For example, that very thin Martian atmosphere coupled with higher gravity means that lunar suits just will not work on Mars. The Apollo lunar suits used water sublimation for cooling, which won’t work on Mars. Also, Apollo lunar suits would weigh far too much on Mars, due to its much higher gravity, so they’re doubly problematic.

        Even landing on the moon is far easier than on Mars. Lunar experience simply does not translate to being prepared for Mars in any meaningful way.

        If the goal is to go to Mars, we should go to Mars. The moon would be nothing more than a very expensive detour since little to none of the lunar surface hardware would be suitable for Mars.

        • Jackalope3000 says:
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          So far I haven’t heard anyone suggest we should go back to the moon with suits that were designed in 1968.

          • fcrary says:
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            The suits in current use aren’t any better. They are even higher mass than the Apollo suits and all use sublimation cooling.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            The space shuttle/ISS suits won’t work either. They are an evolution of the Apollo era suits and suffer the same problems.

        • fcrary says:
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          I’m very familiar with the issues for Mars EVA suits. A less noted problem is logistics. The use of heavy insulation and sublimation/evaporation cooling consumes a totally unsustainable amount of water per person-hour of use. That’s true of but the Moon and Mars (where you could probably rig up something to use evaporation rather than sublimation, although I really don’t like the idea.)

          For landing, it isn’t clear to me that landing is easier on the Moon. You’ve got no air to slow down and parachutes don’t work. But I’ll certainly agree that, except for a terminal stage or an all-propulsive decent, the two are very different.

          I can actually think of some tests worth doing on the Moon, in support of a manned Mars mission. But not necessarily by astronauts. Off the top of my head, fluid flow is different in microgravity and in terrestrial gravity, and life support systems involve lots of plumbing. When it comes to designing Mars habitats, it would be nice to know if ~40% terrestrial gravity is good enough. A small (robotic) experiment on the lunar surface could settle that. If the lunar and terrestrial results are the same, you’re in business. If they aren’t you’ve got two points two interpolate between. That’s just off the top of my head; there are probably lots of other examples.

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            The delta-V for landing on the Moon is a lot less due to the much lower gravity. Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, you don’t have to worry about aerodynamic effects (forces, heating, and etc). It’s a fact that it is easier to land on the moon.

          • fcrary says:
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            Since Mars does have an atmosphere, and you can use it to slow down, stopping requires essentially no propulsive delta-v. (Targeting maneuvers and the terminal decent don’t contribute much.) We could get into point designs, but I don’t really see the value of that. Both sorts of landings have their advantages and disadvantages. For some applications, one might be easier than the other. For others, it could go the other way.

            For the similar, planetary science comparison (landing a probe on Europa versus Titan), I’ve seen the studies and the atmosphere makes Titan a much easier target. For a large, sustained program, I could see an all-propulsive landing being better (an all-propulsive landing consumes fuel, but no hardware like a heat shield.)

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            Mars has a *very* thin atmosphere. We really don’t know (for sure) how to land anything heavy on Mars without a significant amount of the deceleration coming from propulsive delta-V. Inflatable heat shields might be the answer, but they have not yet been proven to work at the hypersonic speeds necessary to decelerate a manned craft in the very thin Martian atmosphere.

            The more conventional alternative would be assembling a massive, rigid, heat shield in microgravity since we don’t have a launch vehicle payload shroud big enough to launch the thing in one piece.

          • fcrary says:
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            And propulsive slowing to land on the Moon (I make it 2.5 km/s) is going to take at least 0.75 times your dry mass worth of fuel. This is what I meant about point designs. I’m sure I could find a way to get a Dragon-sized vehicle on Mars using atmospheric drag to so it, without using large heat shields. A ball park estimate says it would work for a 5 deg. entry corridor and a heat shield no wider than the capsule, slowing to terminal velocity about a scale height above the surface (call it 10 km.) That’s a very rough number, because I don’t really feel like doing more. The answer is that which is easier, Mars or the Moon, depends on the details and those details aren’t well enough defined for a definitive answer.

    • mfwright says:
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      “Mars is years away”
      Mars will always be 20 years away for humans.

    • Jackalope3000 says:
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      And to add to that, until we have a reliable, reusable, robust, affordable lunar transportation and habitation infrastructure to build upon, trips to Mars will be expensive, one-off stunts just like Apollo, but with a much higher consequence of catastrophic failure.

  9. Joseph Smith says:
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    What really struck me when I went from the robotic exploration part of NASA to the SSF/ISS was that nobody had the experience Actually building spacecraft, that was considered necessary and expected on the robotic side. NASA seemed to make us as contractors do everything three times before it was right. It seemed to me to be mostly inexperience.

    Adding an atmosphere to a spacecraft isn’t really that hard, unless you never build a spacecraft before.

    Trump sent one Alabama Senator to the Justice Department. Maybe he can make the other an ambassador to somewhere, and some progress could be made in Congress.

    • Terry Stetler says:
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      Ambassador to Neptune?

    • NArmstrong says:
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      Beginning with Goldin in 1993, NASA human space flight, in Station at that time, but continuing today in the non-program that currently exists, decided that they now no longer wanted any experienced people in any positions of responsibility. This began with Randy Brinkly who had no experience building spaceships, and continues to this day with the current set of managers and directors, all the way up to the Administrator and AAs.

      There was lots of capable experience from Shuttle and earlier programs, Mir, Spacelab, Spacehab (both Mir and Spacehab were the definition of commercialization and expedited payload processing, and even people who had worked Moon and Mars mission planning and spacecraft design. Absolutely none of this experience was used, It was all thrown away. It killed people’s careers, and it is killing the program today.

      It is downright sad, and criminal that we listen to the current managers saying “we’ve never done anything like this before”. It is true, the managers in position of authority today never did what needs to be done, but there were a lot of us who had done the job.

      These people have wasted tens of billions of dollars, and they continue to do so.

    • muomega0 says:
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      It’s partly the result of still building and operating decades old hardware; and also outsourcing. Another is the inability to create multiple new TRL raising programs required to head BEO with less risk and cost. Even fresh outs have to learn the tricks of the trade in the ‘everything is better in the private sector’.

      The country is better off if the USG, industry, and academia ALL are at the top of their games. Do your really want political appointees calling all the shots?

      • Joseph Smith says:
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        I’m not talking about the political appointees. I’m talking about the engineers and managers. That is what was scary.

  10. RocketScientist327 says:
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    Oh I am going to have fun with this one tomorrow.

    Seriously – SLS is truly the senate launch system. It is a porker, pork barrel project supported by both democrats and republicans. It is not about American spaceflight but politics.

    We could do a hell of a lot with $43 billion – staging in LEO – and moving to CIS Lunar. This is outrageous. I hope everyone reads this and sends it to their congress critter in a non-partisan way.

    I am quite certain someone will come in explaining this all away as a good thing.

  11. Terry Stetler says:
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    So, according to Ars…

    NASA’s overhead,

    is 72% of SLS’s cost ?
    is 56% of Orion’s cost ?
    is only 14% of Commercial Crews cost

    What’s wrong with this picture? ?

    • JJMach says:
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      To be fair, I can already imagine SLS backers noting that NASA overhead of the Commercial Crew project does not include the commercial company’s internal overhead.
      My counter-counterargument is that the Ars figure does not account for the internal overhead of the SLS contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital ATK, Aerojet). How much of their cost is actually overhead, trying to comply with all the paperwork and compliance activities NASA overhead is requiring of them?

      The Commercial Crew companies have every incentive to create a safe and reliable vehicle. If they fail, they will lose billions to their competitors. They also have every incentive to make their safety and quality assurance compliance as streamlined and easy to implement as possible, as every dollar not wasted there makes them that much more competitive. They also have a strong incentive to create a clear and complete set of requirements at the start, because they can’t afford to change the design as they go.

      I am pretty well versed in NASA projects where NASA intends to hire a contractor to build something for them, then they also launch an internal project with non-experts to design the project. When they hire the expert contractor to (re)design and build the project, the experts now have to justify every design variance with NASA’s non-experts. Add to this the often vague engineering, safety, and quality requirements that leave much open to interpretation and “tailoring” (i.e., you may have no idea what is needed for compliance until you submit what you think is required and are told you have to do it over). There is also NASA’s bizarre budget process that often forces them to try to break ground on a project before the design is reviewed (or even complete!) so costly design revisions naturally occur. If you are the contractor, you shrug and send NASA another costly change order, or you tell NASA it is out of scope of your contract and let them try to figure out how to do it themselves. Either way, it is no skin off the nose of the contractor.

      The SLS is being treated as “too big to fail” at this point, with so many in congress using it as a pork project, there is every reason to believe that any cost overrun will be covered.

  12. Ryan says:
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    Non-recurring engineering, which is the major cost of building things in small quantities, seems to be included in this “overhead” number.