The #Moon2024 Thing Is Going To Be Expensive
Well the numbers are starting to settle on the cost of the whole #Moon2024 thing. We've heard numbers in draft revised @NASA budget requests to Congress that come close to $8 billion more a year for the next 5 years for a total additional cost of $40 billion. #ShowMeTheMoney pic.twitter.com/hDDBkPXQsK
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) April 30, 2019
High cost, lack of support spell trouble for 2024 Moon landing plan, Ars Technica
“It will be a lot of money, regardless. According to two Washington, DC-based sources, NASA has informed the White House that it will need as much as $8 billion a year, for the next five years, to speed development of the Space Launch System rocket, a Lunar Gateway, a lunar lander, new spacesuits, and related hardware for a 2024 landing. This is on top of the agency’s existing annual budget of about $20 billion, which includes everything from the International Space Station to astrophysics research.”
$40 billion? OK, cool.
Now take that money, split it evenly between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and we can have two bases on the moon in the same amount of time.
Split evenly? This implies some sort of equality between the two companies, an equality that hasn’t been demonstrated.
In fact, many hasten to include BO when talking about SX. But other than some “maybe” tourist rockets, and some big empty buildings at the Cape, what?
Meanwhile, SX is readying the first StarLink birds; demonstrated F9 as a reliable workhorse; won the hearts of those steely generals for both F9 and FH; put an automobile into interplanetary orbit; showing progress outside and in the open for StarHopper; sends resupplies to ISS for autonomous docking; is nearly ready to initiate maned flights (yes, there’s an issue)…and BO? Not even close.
Fair enough – SpaceX is way ahead of Blue Origin at this point, so it’s unrealistic to split the money evenly. Would you agree that 2/3 for BO and 1/3 for SpX would be more appropriate?
As much as I like SpaceX and respect Musk, I don’t want to put all our eggs in a single basket. As slow as they are, Blue Origin is the only other serious commercial contender that I can think of – so I’d be happy to throw some cash their way. If not them, who?
$8 billion/year in additional funding for this means it’s basically DOA. Congress is not going to approve that, and (hopefully) they won’t be able to cannibalize $8 billion from good programs in the rest of NASA to pay for this.
I can’t wait for us to get the Lunar Orbiting Tollbooth and nothing else, with a lander coming “sometime in the future” and nothing to do at said tollbooth except the same type of microgravity health research we do now at ISS, except much more expensive.
Yes, looks like NASA has slammed President Trump just like they did the first President Bush. Of course this really clears the road for private space.
One doesn’t exactly see private space companies lining up for lunar business. Do you see any signs of that? I led one of the CLPS winning teams and they – like I’m sure most of the others – are having a really hard rime coming up with the capital necessary for this public private partnership. That’s for a low cost, i.e., ~$100Mish robotic lunar lander. Where’s the business case? If one is going to invest in space, there are far better bets in earth orbit. Just look at the flow of investment capital.
There really isn’t a business case for anything on the lunar surface. A lander would have to accidentally land on top of a lightly buried mountain of pure gold.
Meanwhile, as you said, all the investment capital is flowing to space stuff nearer to home. Especially small-launchers.
That wouldn’t matter .. you couldn’t actually claim it .. everyone would have a right to mine your mt.
But the gold you brought back to Earth would be yours, once you have it back on the ground . . . probably. I mean, it’d be like staking a claim on a meteorite that falls to Earth.
As you said, you couldn’t stop anyone else from mining it on the Moon, too. Assuming even that would be enough – that much gold would crash worldwide prices of it, and the infrastructure to mine and transport it would be immensely expensive.
Which why the markets would only decline to the level of your cost of production.
Well if it was all the same .. I will just buy a legally enforced mineral rights claim to gold on terra firma. I have long stated you do not have to bring the gold home for it to be an asset … gold is an asset regardless where it is located in the ground. The value of a mine decreases in value as you deplete the veins…. But the value of the certified gold stays at market value. I believe without property rights and with it mineral and water rights the scrap yard model is a more likely way the moon will be developed. Piles of various metals stacked up like a scrap yard.
Nope, that is what the Space Resources Act of 2015 made clear, if you pick it up you own it. And the non-interference (Article 9 OST) keeps others away while you work it. Folks need to refer to the legal articles and Hearings conducted at the time the OST, instead of listening to those folks trying to bring in later concepts from the LOST that have no relevance in space.
How do you “pick up” a “mountain of gold” ? Unless you totally surround that mountain with a workforce and equipment you would others simply mining the other side. We see companies slant drilling on others oil fields all the time .. you think people would stay off of a mountain?
Don’t be silly.
There is the noninterference clause in the Outer Space Treaty, and I could get creative. If I put the right scientific instruments around that mountain of gold, and hang up “do not disturb” signs, that would be enough to tie anyone attempting to approaching up in court for a long time. Note that slant drilling is legal because there are no similar laws about noninterference, and where there are (e.g. affects on ground water) slant drilling has been challenged in court.
Exactly. This is how the Apollo landing sites are protected since salvage is not allowed under the OST. The only question, which will be resolved by practice is how close you may come to one the sites before it’s considered interference. In a similar situation for the Geosynchronous orbit the agreed on spacing was one degree, thereby creating the orbital slots for communication satellites that are bought and sold like property is. Something similar will be worked out for the Moon, likely based how lunar dust behaves.
Dust was exactly what I was thinking of. Since it does pick up a static electric charge in space (photoemission from ultraviolet light) how dust settles on the Moon is a complicated and poorly understood question. I know someone who would love to put an instrument on the lunar surface to study this. A company wanted to fund such a project (as research and development on operating conditions for lunar infrastructure), and place the instrument at a site of their choosing. To make the required measurements, it would have to be undisturbed for months (say when the miners aren’t working, I assume claim jumpers wouldn’t be a concern when the miners are around) and “undisturbed” could mean nothing raising dust within a kilometer. I’m not sure how the courts would rule on that, but it’s plausible enough they that I think they would hear the case. Which keeps the claim jumpers tied up in court for years.
That would be a very useful experiment. It also might fit in with an idea I had of creating artificial cold traps by launch sites to capture the exhaust of rockets arriving/departing the Moon. If you could capture 20-30% of it, perhaps by creating an electrical field to steer the exhaust molecules to the traps, it might be worth while doing.
I wonder if you could just dig a moat. Those molecules would tend to bounce around, in the form of short, ballistic hops, until they hit a sufficiently cold surface. If you could dig a moat around the launch site, deep enough that the bottom was in permanent shadow, that might be cold enough. At worst, the regolith at the bottom would be heavily enriched in water ice (or whatever the exhaust was made of.)
I completely agree. That’s what baffles me about the whole notion of doing this via a “public-private partnertship” model. For launch, that model makes total sense. For the lunar imnitiative… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Companies sell intangible things to the public (and to governments, for that matter) all the time. I’d say SpaceIL has just sold the Israeli people, or enough of them, of the intangible value associated with their country making a successful lunar landing. At least, it seems like they’ve got funding to try it again, and it doesn’t look like that’s all their own pockets. The question might be what other intangible, lunar things will people buy?
Yes, national pride is an intangible and the taste they got from the first attempt generated the funds to try again.
You are thinking in terms of the 19th Century, not 21st Century. The products that allow a lunar venture to pay off will be intangible at first, not tangible like Gold.
The market research I did for a lunar venture shows that there is a market, but not the conventional ones most are chasing after. As in all pioneer markets you need to do the missionary work to create it on Earth before you even try to sell the lunar portion. That is the weakness I found in just about all the private lunar ventures, the follow the old Production Concept by decide they want to go to the Moon and then try to find someone to bankroll it. They also set the minimum startup level at an impractical level, like $100 million, and then are unhappy when you tell them they are looking at the problem backwards. First you find a need, they you show how you could fulfill it. But the need has to be one you could fulfill at 3F or crowd funding levels and then build up. But since they want to build the lunar lander they insist on skipping those steps and going right to the lander and fail. As I teach my students, it’s the difference between how Starbucks built out and Webvan did.
I think that SpaceIL just demonstrated that landing on the Moon for $100M is a very risky proposition. I can seing the recurring cost being around that LOE.
Didn’t B612 try crowd funding? Didn’t trurn out so well in an effort to help protect our planet, so I’m really skeptical that crowd funding is a viable path for the size of the investment needed.
BTW, NASA CAN do very successful small missions. We created the highly successful SMEX program when I was at NASA Hqs. One key is to constrain requirements. We did that by constraining missions to fly on the Pegasus launch vehicle.
So NASA needs to define reasonable requirements. Human landing in the South Polar Region of the Moon by 2024 doesn’t fall into that category by any stretch of the imagination.
Again, you focus on the wrong end of the business model…
SMEX wasn’t just about constraining the launch vehicle. NASA also allowed a bit more freedom in terms of development practices. If you look at one of the Space Science Reviews papers on the FAST mission (the first SMEX), the authors flat out say the mission was only possible within the cost cap because the decided (and were allowed to decide) to develop it as a class C rather than B mission.
The sad thing is that I can actually imagine how it would cost them an extra $8 billion/year for this. The mandatory use of SLS and Orion, the forced-use of the LOP-G*, that complicated three-part lander that’s supposed to be partially reusable, and so forth.
* Any idea on why LOP-G is still a thing in all these plans, when they’re planning on building landers that can make it up to the higher orbit that Orion can reach anyways? I thought the LOP-G was only a thing in the first place because there was nothing in the budget to provide SLS or Orion a destination.
You forget, that is only their first estimate. Remember the first estimates for the ISS? The SLS? If NASA does it you are looking at around $400 billion, not $40 billion.
And this is why it’s going to be DOA with Congress. Unfortunately Congress is part of the problem (SLS/Orion), so I’m not looking to them to be part of the solution.
I’m hoping SLS will collapse under its own weight sometime soon and that NASA will transition to commercially procured launches (preferably with multiple suppliers like both commercial cargo and commercial crew).
Best case is for Bridenstine to manage to divert enough funds to SpaceX and maybe Blue Origin to demonstrate cislunar operation while SLS first launch pushes inevitably to 2022 or 2023.
I disagree that a commercial case should be made before private money enters the business. Why does Elon want to go to Mars ? For the property rights ?? Why are we going “back to the Moon” ? To learn how to do things in space, to learn how being offworld affects us. If we want to do ISRU, we don’t want to learn how to do it on Mars, we want (IMHO) to learn something about doing it on the Moon before attempting it on Mars (sure there’ll be more lessons to learn on Mars, at least we’ll have a (small) knowledge base from which to work out solutions.
No it does not. One, the private sector will not make any money sending humans to the Moon. And they can not afford the start up costs to develop a destination on the Moon that anyone would pay to go to. The past 50 years of history has proven this. Doing science for science will never get any significant human population off Earth, ever. And no one wants to address the true reason of WHY we should be going there and WHAT people will be doing there.
Those questions only matter if you want to use NASA money. And science is not a driver anymore than it was in other frontiers. Science is a by product of opening frontiers, as in the American West. The more accessible the frontier is made by commercial activities the more accessible it is to science.
Unless, of course, Mr. Bezos says, “I can do it for $1 billion per year, not $8 billion. And I’m going to prove it just because I’ve got the money and I fell like it.” Or, some other private company from letting it be known they could do it for $2 or $3 billion per year, if NASA were willing to contract it out like commercial cargo or crew to ISS.
You do realize there is already a billionaire putting down significant amount of money for sending himself and his friends to the Moon, right? He’s not alone either since Space Adventures have also mentioned potential interest from their customers for a lunar flyby mission.
What private sector can or cannot afford to do is entirely dependent on how much it would cost to send payload to the Moon. If it’s tens of billions of dollars for sending 3 men, then it’s an obvious non-starter, but if it’s say $1M per ton to lunar surface, then developing a destination on the Moon by private sector suddenly becomes more likely.
The past 50 years of history only shows it’s impossible to develop the Moon with government only approach, it’s time to try something else.
Funny, people said a private company couldn’t afford to build a reusable launch system either a decade ago. All the old NASA hands knew it was completely impossible. And yet we now have two operating launch systems that were developed for less than NASA is spending to build a crawler that might get used two times.
Two? I’m afraid New Shepard doesn’t count unless you include suborbital launch systems.
Falcon and FH.
Ok. I think of them as two variations of the same vehicle, like an Atlas V 401 (no solids) and an Atlas V 551 (bigger faring and five solids.) But I can see how reasonable people could see it differently.
“good programs”? like the excellently managed JWST?
MAVEN? New Horizons? Spirit and Opportunity? Kepler?
Yes. Thanks for reminding folks just how successful planetary sciences, for one, has been.
Actually, I intentionally left out some of the more prominent successes. Those I listed were both successes _and_ well managed. Those missions came in either at cost or at least not insanely over budget.
No bucks, no Buck Rodgers……..
That ind of money in the private sector could actually accomplish something.
This seems like a ridiculously large number. I can’t imagine development of a lander costing more than 8 to 10 billion total if using components of Orion as Lockheed is proposing. The Gateway only needs the PPE and a docking module. The space suits shouldn’t cost a billion to develop. If the rest is for speeding up SLS it’s a lot of money they wouldn’t even know how to spend. These numbers sound like they were pulled out of thin air for the express purpose of sabotaging this plan.
Actually getting astronauts to the Moon in five years would require a crash program, and crash programs are financially inefficient. To make sure you have a viable lunar lander available before the deadline, you might need to fund two or three parallel development projects. The same applies to space suits, and everything else. Plus working people on shifts, to get two or three days work done in the time planned to do thing with one group working just eight hours per day. That all adds massive inefficiencies. Asking anyone to do the same work in half the time will drive the costs up. And that’s going to be closer to a factor of ten extra cost than a factor of two.
When was NASA planning on spending money on the Moon landing? They were saying 2028. So in order not to be a crash program the spending would have to start significantly before 2023.
I’m of the opinion all these “plans” are a bit of science fiction to keep the (money) ball rolling.
I don’t want to repost but this obviously goes more appropriately here
https://www.nasaspaceflight…
Note this was being proposed only a little over 3.5 years ago.
So basically NASA been selling a very expensive bit of science fiction to Congress and the public. I’m not really concerned with the Mars missions as that would be purely pie-in-the-sky. The lunar missions however, they were selling not one, not two, not three, but FOUR crewed cis-lunar missions by 2024!
LOL. This can not be unexpected…!!! Especially if it is to be done correctly and not just doing a risky, short-term flags-and-footprints. Just move the $8 billion from the $200+ billion military budget, they wont even miss it. And that would be the best budget for space since 1966. In 1966 NASA got $45 billion in 2018 dollars (oh, and they got just less than that in the years around 1966 also). Imagine what we could do with a $28 billion 2019 budget after 50 years of $20 billion and less. No bucks, no Buck Rogers – put up or shut up.
This whole thing is DOA. Which is a good thing given that SpaceX could get to the moon for one tenth the cost. But no, SLS, Orion and that stupid gateway station need to be kept alive no matter what.
Gateway isn’t stupid. SpaceX couldnt get to the Moon for $10B
I always wondered where they expect new money will come from. Could it be a big announcement was made without regards to political realities? Argue all you want, it is politics that started many space programs and ended many programs. At least more people are talking about lunar landers before there were very few.
Maybe talk about economic development of the moon? Is it really feasible? So far a lot of mass and fuel is needed to get from here to there, and only bring back a few hundred kg? A friend said going to the moon or Mars for mining or business is pure fantasy, he pointed out the mass return is pretty bleak. He also said all this water on the moon, where’s these lakes? I must say I have to agree with this.
Rather than putting an American on the moon just to say look how great we are, I prefer some serious rover work on the moon. Survey work where you don’t need to show a profit as NASA and USGS hires companies to build hardware to get better idea where all this water is. And maybe find some PGMs.
Heh, Dennis Wingo reposted what he wrote 2004 because it is exactly same as now. https://denniswingo.wordpre…
I remember a couple of years later Dennis essentially standing on top of his desk and yelling that we don’t need a giant Ares V rocket to go the Moon or anywhere else for that matter, you can do the same thing with multiple smaller rockets. I thought of Dennis a few months ago when that idea was briefly the hot topic again when Bridenstine suggested possibly using commercial rockets for EM-1. Of course SpaceX wants to demonstrate that it is possible to build an efficient large rocket, which we all have high hopes for, but it’s good to keep the multiple rocket idea in a back pocket just in case.
This +8 billion a year doesn’t add up.
Supposedly the old NASA plan had them getting to the Moon by 2028. Total human spaceflight program spending is about 9 billion per year now, and at least half of which could be Moon related. That adds up to only a difference of about 18 billion dollars between 2024 and 2028.
So why would an “acceleration” to 2024 cost more than twice the 18 billion difference in spending? It doesn’t add up. If anything the difference should be less, not more. Much less.
What this cost really seems to indicate, is that even the older 2028 schedule was absurdly unrealistic. That without a drastic spending increase, NASA would have returned men to the Moon no earlier than 2033. That’s effing crazy.
This is demonstrating that NASA is broken. Maybe even irretrievably broken. If things don’t turn around very rapidly for NASA, drastic consequences may be in order.
I am a child of Apollo. I want NASA to succeed. But too many decades of too many boondoggles is too much to tolerate. Lunar 2024 is the last chance for NASA to get things right.
They have been selling a very expensive science fiction program.
Look at what they were proposing or planning three and a half years ago:
https://www.nasaspaceflight…
What that shows is how terribly the NASA schedule has been slipping to the right. The Trump/Pence “acceleration” is really an attempt to return to the original schedule!
SLS being expensive was always baked into the cake. What’s truly bizarre is how something as supposedly easy as a Shuttle derived launch vehicle has taken so long to become operational. The delay is approaching JWST levels of mismanagement.
Who the heck was minding the NASA store from 2010 until 2017? Oh yeah…
From your description, I think the word you want for NASA’s plans is “delusional.” Although I am also reminded of a friend I knew in the early 1990s, when he was in the Navy as an OS2. People told him his next promotion would come when he stoped saying things like, “Lieutenant, are you totally stoned?”
Gerstenmaier and every one of his minions needs to be fired.
No bucks…No Buck Rodgers
Funny, we’re spending tens of billions of dollars on human spaceflight…and we don’t have Buck Rogers. Wonder why that is.
Oddly, the 1979 film, “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” cost all of $2.5 million to produce and grossed $21.7 million in box office sales. Maybe you only need a few million bucks to get Buck Rogers. You certainly need more to get a real one, but that can be a hard sell. People in 1979 would pay a few dollars to watch a fictional Buck Rogers for a couple hours. How much will people in 2019 pay to see a real Buck Rogers? They will probably only watch for a few hours, plus having a warm, comfortable feeling about America being great. But I can’t see that being enough to get interested people to pay more than a hundred times more than they would pay to see a movie. A hundred times more would be $2.17 billion by this analogy. So human spaceflight can’t depend on the cliche of “no bucks, no Buck Rogers.” Not unless someone can deliver for much less or deliver much more impressive results than NASA has managed.
What disturbed me the most from the article was the attitude of senior NASA managers within the human exploration program regarding a return to the Moon. The sense I get is that they actually don’t want to go back to the Moon, and seek to delay and obfuscate in any way to avoid achieving that goal. They resist any effort to find a solution to make it possible – instead their sole focus is the Gateway.
In other words – their philosophy is lets continue to do what we’ve been doing with the ISS, and replicate it out at the Moon, but not go that next logical step and land. I wonder if many in the senior NASA leadership are still firmly locked into a ‘Mars or bust’ mindset, and oppose the renewed focus on a ‘Moon first’ approach? But the problem is that they must realise that crewed Mars missions – even to just orbit Mars, let alone land – are not realistic until probably the mid-2040s at the earliest.
So – what? NASA does nothing?? Funds continue to be consumed by SLS, ISS, and ultimately Gateway – but we continue to do more of the same?
In reality, as NASA is furiously running around in circles, going nowhere, two key actors – the commercial space sector, and China – will surge ahead. China is already talking a lunar base ‘in the next ten years’ – which is an acceleration of their timetable from 2036. If NASA loses momentum before it even gets started, Beijing will only have greater incentive to beat the US back there. We may not be in a space race with the Chinese right now – but I’m tipping we soon will be, and China will be winning it.
Also, SpaceX and Blue Origin will be sending crews and payload back to the Moon by the mid-2020s, so by the time NASA does actually wake up and realise its been replaced as the lead actor in space, they can think about how they get back to the Moon and be welcomed by commercial astronauts and Chinese Taikonauts.
You are a thoughtful and respected scientist, engineer, or leader.
Then you find yourself with these facts:
• After years of work using all of your professional expertise on a project that blows up after each election. Or sometimes sooner.
• Or, watch scientifically valid plans criticized by folks standing in a huge pile of woo.
• All the while, and with objective certainty earned largely through decades of work, you actually DO know better.
What then?
You might want to demonstrate a better course of action: you could slow the changes, for instance; or when asked for cost estimates report only the high end, both in dollars and time.
Or, you could look at the calendar and count the months until retirement, among other unpleasant alternatives.
I think they know in their heart of hearts that what Trump is proposing is unfeasible and dangerous, but none of them have the guts to stand up to him directly and say so.