NASA Admits That SLS Is A "Jobs Program". Wow. Who Knew?
NASA Moves Forward With Plans For Multi-Billion-Dollar Moon Rocket, NPR
“[NASA SLS Core Stage Manufacturing Manager Chad] BRYANT: Think of it as a jobs program. So we’re taking – all of the funding that is given us to build this rocket, we’re creating jobs everywhere. And not only that, we’re all coming together to build a product that is going to make us proud to be Americans.”
Earlier SLS posts
WPA in the sky! (If, indeed, it ever gets “in the sky”! I told Prof. Langley, “It’ll never get off the ground!”
Go SpaceX! Go Blue Origin!
Ad LEO! Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!
WPA, though explicitly a jobs program, did actually accomplish quite a lot of worthwhile things with those jobs. Sidewalks, bridges, art, etc.
Would that SLS have any prospect of doing as well.
Agreed, in addition, a really nice dam outside of Las Vegas. A jobs program isn’t such a bad thing if you get what was initially planned i.e. a bridge or a road for example. As a believer in SLS/Orion, I was for it when there was no viable Commercial alternative, but as CS comes online that certainty has diminished. When New Glenn is operational it will completely evaporate. Then we will have three choices SpaceX, Blue Origin, and ULA
I’m shocked! Not that it’s a jobs program, but that someone admitted it.
Order of priority on government program:
1 – It benefits member of congress
2 – It benefits large donors as long is it does not conflict with 1
3 – It benefits voters in district as long as does not conflict with 1 or 2
4 – It benefits the country as a whole as long as does not conflict with 1, 2 or 3 but is mostly irrelevant.
Just to be clear, Bryant is the Core Stage Manufacturing manager for SLS, not the overall manager.
And apparently an honest man, though not as politically astute as he might be. Second-gen NASA, his dad worked on Apollo and Shuttle.
Bryant’s incaution aside, the NPR piece is not good news for the SLS program. They quote Lori Garver on SLS’s dubious origins and high costs, before cutting back to the final overly candid Bryant “jobs program” quote, then wrap up with a mention that the Trump Administration is unhappy with SLS delays and just fired “the two top officials heading this effort”.
If they’ve lost NPR, can the NYT be far behind? SLS has always been vulnerable to a preference cascade – IE, the moment when the whole crowd realizes it’s not just them, the Emperor actually is naked – and this may be a sign one is close.
All that aside, “cost more than a billion” (per flight) is charitable for SLS, as is the NASA estimate seen elsewhere of $1.5 billion. It’s clear now that SLS won’t fly more than once a year without really unlikely large additional investments. And the history of such programs is that program budget doesn’t really drop much, if at all, after flight commences. The staff and budgets tend to stay about the same, which in this case means about three billion a year for SLS plus another billion a year for the Orion it will carry. One flight a year, four billion a year likely ongoing budget, the per-flight math is not hard…
Do you work at NASA??
Do you?
Yes.. I do
Yes. I do
Anyone who does work at NASA who discusses these matters in public is well advised to do so with all the anonymity they can practically get. You start questioning billions a year in funding and the core projects of entire NASA Centers, and management can get a mite touchy.
Hah. No, I don’t work at NASA. (Nor ever likely to at this point.) (Out of curiosity, what made you ask that? Regardless of motive, thanks – it was the best amusement I’ve had in days.)
To be clear, my primary job for the last thirty-plus years has been working towards radically cheaper space transportation. Educational/advocacy stuff, along with occasional pot-stirring and ankle-biting. (Along with a variety of secondary jobs to pay the bills, everything from digging ditches to at one point contractor Project Manager on a NASA LOX-methane tech demo lander engine.)
This primary job has inevitably led to me working near, with, around, at cross-purposes to, and occasionally against NASA’s space transportation establishment. I’m pretty familiar with said establishment at this point.
To be clear, opinions I express under my own name are my own, and may be less thoroughly considered and/or reviewed by others for intemperate excesses than those I may from time to time write up for Space Access Society.
Just curious. Because i work on the SLS Program.
In light of your awaiting-moderation mention that you work on SLS, two thoughts. One, the very best of luck to you in any changes that may lie ahead.
And two, my profound sympathy to all the competent and well-intentioned people stuck in accreted dysfunction within various parts of NASA. (Like chocolate chips in a concrete cookie…) May you all someday be freed to accomplish great things.
I don’t think losing NPR or the NYT is going to have that much impact with this administration ( you know all that Fake News! In the nation’s paper of record). It would really be interesting if this started to appear on Fox News as an example of wasteful spending.
Even though I don’t agree with Artemis, I do have to give credit to this Administration for at least starting to hold NASA management more accountable. They need to do it Agency wide. I know you posted that these type of management ills only affected HSF. The problem is they started running the research centers on the same model. Center directors with HSF backgrounds, huge Project Offices, chief engineers, and safety organizations and an emphasis on large dollar research efforts with little accountability as to whether they were a success or a failure.
Shrug. NYT, Fox News, whatever – “NYT” was shorthand for influential media outlets in general (and also such an outlet more likely to be influenced by NPR than many).
As with the original “Bridge To Nowhere”, this decision won’t be forced unless the media in general seize on the project as an example of flagrantly obvious waste. And the NPR piece is a hint that day may be getting closer.
And make no mistake, minority Congressional regional pork factions like the one sponsoring SLS/Orion depend on the majority in Congress going along. “You support our pork, we support yours” is SOP. But once a project has become a national media embarrassment, all bets are off. A few “Rocket To Nowhere” national headlines and rats fleeing a sinking ship will look solid and stable compared to Congressional support for the project among the majority.
Your numbers are on target. Herein lies the problem. But there is some evidence of a way out. Sort of.
Definitely, we have raised a NASA spaceflight culture that is also a cost plus legacy prime (Lockheed, Boeing, etc) culture. There is an almost surreal belief throughout that anything worthwhile and anything done right can’t worry about cost and will take time. The root causes of this are another matter.
In the Shuttle days leading to ISS you could make it past all this inefficiency, somewhat. The space station showed little progress for a decade, was almost canceled, and was reinvented many times. Sounds familiar? And let’s not forget all the “what comes after Shuttle” false starts through the 90s.
Fast forward to now and times are moving even faster, multiple external events are competing with NASA habits, and a Falcon Heavy is a fact, not a cartoon. Where does this end?
Ultimately, going with an MCU analogy, when Shield is Hydra, you have to ask if any part is worth saving.
If there is a saving grace, once it has become clear there is no way out, programs like commercial cargo and crew have come about. Especially with the later, there came the realization its commercial crew, or zilch. Period. The dilemma the SLS and Orion community have is they are still in denial as they are nearing the same position with no way out.
I’ve been working the problem you describe for over thirty years – that institutional NASA takes far longer and costs far more than commercial alternatives to do any given project, all the while maintaining stoutly that this is simply the way things are – that “space is hard”, NASA knows best, and there is no alternative.
And as you touch on, over that time, it’s been getting worse. Shuttle flew, barely. (One in four loss odds later calculated on the first flight, one in 67 actual odds demonstrated over the program, overall cost per flight $1.8 billion in 2019 dollars.) Station flew, even more narrowly avoiding cancellation and for well north of a hundred billion. And I lost count of the attempted Shuttle replacement projects that each ate a few billion and a few years then quietly died never-flown. Then of course the Constellation disaster, and now finally (we can hope) SLS/Orion.
The problem for much of that time is that those few of us who cared enough to deep-dive the history knew back in the eighties that the NASA process was ten or more times worse than known alternatives, but we had no obvious proofs. “Space is hard, NASA knows best, and there is no alternative” stood.
Finally, COTS snuck through under the radar, Falcon 9 flew – and some unsung hero at NASA did a study of what F9 actually cost to first flight ($300m, or $390m if as I do you count Falcon 1 as part of the F9 development) versus what NASA’s standard models said F9 would cost done their way: $4 billion.
So by their own models, as of spring 2011 the NASA way would cost 10x more than commercial.
And right about the same time, GAO came out with a study that said the NASA way was averaging 55% higher final program costs than their initial predictions. So, the NASA way actually cost 15x more than commercial.
So yes, eight years later the traditional NASA way is looking a little shaky. But as you point out, the denial is strong in them. And as we were pointing out in 2011, there’s no telling how long the old way might yet stagger along eating resources and impeding actual progress. See http://www.space-access.org… – what we said back then stands up pretty well today.
That’s a good write up at the link. After you’ve seen as much over the years, what’s entrenched, where the bad habits have gotten worse, it’s hard to see a way forward. The places that saw some success, and the cancellations where poor programs , incentives and/or management imploded may say a bit about what’s ahead.
Eventually it may come down to, if you have a Winnebago but require Ferrari performance, at some point you need to stop tinkering with the Winnebago and instead just jack up its radiator cap and slide a Ferrari in underneath.
That is shocking! You mean it wasn’t really about boldly exploring space! The Congress should investigate. ?
But Gerst took the blame…
There is room for a lot more to take the blame. Looks like all the dirty laundry is starting to come out.
He was head of human spaceflight at NASA. Congress didn’t mandate he do a sorry job at managing it.
It’s probably Trump’s fault because it’s always his fault.
In most cases, yes.
K I L L S L S N O W.
That might have been the worst possible way to say it, but from context, I think he was trying to point out something others have said as well. All that money is spent on Earth, and in the United States (well, mostly…) It’s not like NASA is launching hundred dollar bills into orbit, or burning them in rockets as fuel.
Of course SLS is a jobs program, and I don’t like the government spending more money than necessary just to spend money. But there’s nothing wrong with pointing out how your work benefits the local economy.
All other things being equal, of course, it’s better when Federal jobs programs produce something likely to be of some positive benefit at the eventual price.
curious how it will play out if michoud gets flooded per
https://twitter.com/wayneha…
The full interview does include:
GREENFIELDBOYCE: …He says the interior of this factory has changed a lot since the days of Apollo, but the walls and the roof haven’t.
BRYANT: So the roof is a nightmare to maintain here. We’ll get really hard rain here in Louisiana. The roof will leak every now and then.
But rockets do end up on the pad with a weather hold, while a rainstorm passes. Within reasonable limits, getting wet shouldn’t be an issue. If it is, someone made a real mistake with the environmental requirements.
We can waste resources faster than anyone else in the world. So proud to be a ‘Murcan. So proud.
Oh, we’re not unique in this .. google Roscosmos/Vostochny some time. Mercedes encrusted in diamonds … just sayin.
It sounds like he is trying to sell the program to those who dont believe in Space. Nothing of concern. A good tactic actually.