What The SLS Budget Could Have Bought
Quick math. Assume $100 million for a @SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The $34 billion cost thus far of developing @NASA_SLS (which has not even flown) could have bought 340 Falcon Heavy rockets. The final $50 billion cost of SLS could have bought 500 of them. Just sayin' https://t.co/LlYVnzL7rh
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) November 13, 2019
Let’s be more pessimistic. You would want a payload for those Falcon Heavies. Let’s say robotic planetary missions along the lines of the Discovery program ($500 million per) and you might need to a fully expendable Falcon Heavy launch ($200 million, I think.) So that $34 billion would “only” get you 48 Discovery missions. That’s four times as many as the actual Discovery program has flown in its entire, quarter-century history. Even making the most pessimistic I can think of, that’s still much more value than I expect to see from SLS.
$34 billion would get you a Flagship-level mission to every planet in the solar system, with funding to spare for a bunch of Discovery-Class missions. We could finally do a Venus Lander mission with a chance of surviving longer than 24 hours.
3.4 James Webb Space Telescopes…oh, wait…
I’d bet a good chunk of James Webb is development costs, not costs to actually build the hardware. So if you were to build, say, a dozen copies of James Webb, you might have been able to do that with $34 billion. Say $10 billion for development costs and $2 billion to build each copy.
I’m not sure about the per copy price, but yes, most of JWST’s cost has been development. But I don’t think there would be enough demand to justify a dozen copies of JWST. It can’t be serviced, so it’s not like you get the whole sky to look at all over again, every time a new instrument is installed. There are some ground-based observatories which are nearly identical (e.g. Gemini North and South), but that’s usually to cover both the northern and southern skies. Given the choice and $34 billion, I think most astronomers would spend half of it on a few $5 billion telescopes which were very different from JWST (e.g. WFIRST and LUVOIR) and a bunch of specialized, Explorer-class telescopes.
Ouch!
Yes, yes, but the rockets wouldn’t have been built in Alabama…
Just be glad that Alabama is a lower cost labor state 😉
Yea, that way we can keep more people working for longer without accomplishing anything.
I think the rockets are actually built in Lousiana
True. But SLS also has the attribute that Boeing is currently only delivering the Block 1A. The engineers in Alabama get to work on the Block 1B (with Exploration Upper Stage) next. That will be followed by Block 2. So the welfare for engineers will continue for many years to come.
Keep in mind Block 1A is not human rated.
Considering crew is going to fly on Block 1A on the so called Artemis mission, it’s either “crew rated” or NASA has signed off on the waivers necessary to fly crew on it anyway. It’s damn “convenient” when you’re the organization writing both the rules and the waivers for your own vehicles.
It could also buy a total of 25,000 Starship launches placing some 2.5 million tons in LEO. That is equal to 18,500 Amtrak passenger diesel locomotives or 46,000 Caterpillar D9 Bulldozers or 10 million Starlink satellites – good bye night sky. ??
Gee, you could build an O’Neill Colony with that type of mass in orbit.
L5 is lot tougher to get to than LEO.
But your larger point is well taken.
One development program….$34 billion.
One unit marginal cost…$2+ billion.
One happy Senator…priceless.
One Senator who, being the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is the 4th most powerful man in the US government, and unfortunately knows the price of of power, his power, that he intends to keep wielding.
You’re absolutely right, Keith. When are the relevant people going to GET IT?! A crewed lunar program could have been done with twinned launches of the Delta IV-Heavy and the planned but unbuilt Atlas V-Heavy. And later; with the much cheaper Falcon Heavy and Vulcan-Centaur V launchers. They picked the WRONG sort of Shuttle-derived booster. If they had picked the right sort; those Alabama jobs would still have been there and paid for. As it stands right now with SLS: ‘The Emporer Has No Clothes’. Just as it was ten years ago with Mike Griffin and his ridiculous Ares 1 Etcetera… 🙁
Apollo on steroids. Very expensive steroids.
While the Starship is not a sure thing (yet!), it looks like it will be cheaper to operate than a Falcon or Falcon Heavy. At the rate they are building the stainless steel wonders, it may well be much cheaper to build as well. And the capability will extend throughout the solar system. Likely coming to orbit in 2020, the clock is ticking ever faster on SLS. Keith Cowing is absolutely right to point this out!
Who knows what the Starship cost swill be but they will be less per pound than Falcons. I can only imagine how many could be bought for this amount of money!
If SLS costs $2 billion a launch and puts 95 tons in LEO the cost is $23,157/kg to LEO
If, as Elon Musk is saying, Starship costs $2 million a launch and puts 100 tons into LEO the cost Is only $22/kg to LEO
If the $50 billon for SLS allows a total of 8 astronauts to reach the Moon the cost per astronaut would be $6.25 billion each – the $6 billion astronauts ?
If a lunar Starship uses four Starship tankers to refuel the $50 billion would allow 5,000 Starship missions to the Moon with 100 astronauts each, for a total of 500,000 astronauts at a cost of $100,000 each. Really even if Starship costs $200 million a flight rather than the $2 million Elon Musk states it will it still makes the SLS look like a joke. The cost then would still be only $10 million an astronaut to the lunar surface.
“And the capability will extend throughout the solar system.” Lets see.. I can certainly see it getting humans and payload to the Moon, but I think Musk needs to explain his approach to dealing with the biomedical challenges facing the 100 people on board en-route to and from Mars. Going further, as suggested, accentuates those challenges. Microgravity, space radiation, psychological challenges – all have to be solved for deep space.
I’m all for SpaceX and Starship / Super Heavy, and it promises great leaps forward for human space flight – but we need to get on top of the human challenges issues just as much as we need a more elegant spaceflight concept epitomised by Starship.
More proof that SLS needs to be killed. What a waste of money. Get the government out of the rocket-building business. FOREVER.
These dollar numbers need context. The cost of the Saturn V with engines and 15 flight units was $47B in 2019$. The total cost of the Apollo/Saturn program was $153B also in 2019$. These numbers are compiled from NASA’s annual budget documents and NASA congressional testimony dating back to the Apollo days.
Note that Apollo ended before there was a viable alternative. There now exists, however, much less expensive alternatives to SLS. More alternatives are just over the temporal horizon. That’s key context.
That’s correct, of course. But my point is that the $50B cost estimate for SLS is not out of line with the most comparable cost, namely that of Apollo/Saturn. Both of these vehicles are/were designed to put humans on the Moon. I could have included costs for the Space Shuttle, but that vehicle was restricted to low Earth orbit (LEO) operations only.
Except that when Apollo Saturn was in development we had never done anything like it before and we had to invent a lot of new things and we had to build a lot of infrastructure in order to support the new systems. None of that is true with Orion/SLS. Its not high tech; Orion was selected because of its similarity to Apollo and then the Orion SM was selected because it was just a repurposed ATV. SLS is basically all Shuttle hardware so far. Stretched and rebuilt so sure some new engineering was involved but so far nothing really new about the structure, the SRBs or the SSMEs. It should have been done for a lot less and a lot sooner.
It’s very high tech. That SLS core had to be completely redesigned to accommodate the four RS-25 engines in the tail and the Orion spacecraft and the upper stage on top as well has having the attach points for the two SRMs. It’s not just a slightly modified External Tank from the Space Shuttle. And those SRMs were also completely redesigned for SLS.
I disagree. Sure there was some structural engineering involved. New technology? Drastically different than anything before? No.
I don’t consider that very high tech. To me, that means new technology. Your description uses _re_design too many times for that. The RS-25s, the boosters and the core are all 1970s technology. They aren’t the same design as their Shuttle equivalents. But they are fundamentally very similar and largely based on the same technology. The upper stages (both ICPS and EUS) are built around the RL-10 engines, which first flew in 1963. Sure, over the years, there have been lots of upgrades and new versions, but that’s also true of the Boeing 737 (first flight in 1967) but that doesn’t make the 737-900ER “high tech.” (I’ll be polite and not say anything about the MAX…)
Did that total cost include the VAB, crawler, the mission centers?
And are you saying the 15 Saturn V rockets cost $47B in 2019$? Does that include landers, etc?
I’m sure Apollo was costly and it’s the probably the key reason why it wasn’t sustainable. I’m not sure an equally or more expensive program will be any more sustainable.
Here’s the cost breakdown in 2019$:
Apollo spacecraft (CSM/LM) $51B (CSM includes 12 Block I and 23 Block II flight units.
LM includes 16 flight units)
Saturn V $42B (includes 15 flight units)
Operations $18B
Apollo facilities $13B
Tracking/Data Acquisition $11B
Saturn IB (with engines) $7B (includes 11 flight units)
Saturn I (with engines) $6B (includes 12 flight units)
Saturn V engines $5B (includes F-1 and J-2 flight units)
Total $153B
In all cases, that’s significantly more flight hardware than was ever flown. I’m not a fan of SLS, but I hope the same thing doesn’t happen again. If we’ve got one built, paid for and ready to fly, we might as well use it.
Yep. You’re right about that. NASA had scheduled flights through Apollo 20, but 18, 19 and 20 were cancelled soon after the Apollo 11 mission made history. There was also the Apollo Applications Program (AAP) that produced Skylab, which used three Command/Service Module spacecraft. The rest of these spacecraft are in the museums.
Thanks for the numbers.
The SLS does look somewhat comparable with Saturn V. Of course, SLS is not fully developed yet to Saturn V levels of capability.
Admission to Disney World for every man, woman and child in the US.
136,000 houses @ 250k for homeless veterans.
You know, $50 billion wouldn’t be so bad (for a NASA project) if we actually had developed some new technology and had something flying by now. But there is no new technology-it is all repurposed Shuttle stuff some modified slightly, and of course nothing is flying, and the real high tech stuff, like the lander-no one has even started on yet. Can the IG perhaps figure out why NASA and its contractors are doing such a poor job?