Does NASA Know The Real Cost Of Sending Humans To The Moon?
Keith’s note: In the NASA FY 2021 budget briefing I asked Jim Morhard what the total cost of Artemis would be up to the point of landing people on the Moon. He said $35 billion. Yea that’s apparently the additional cost to do Artemis I, II, III – on top of what was already being done. But what was already being done was to send humans to the Moon – you know, like SLS, Orion, ground systems, etc. NASA has been sending humans back to the Moon since 14 January 2004. This guessing game has been an ongoing sport amongst the media for 16 years – trying to find out how much the NASA Moon program will cost. NASA now tries to pretend that Orion and SLS are somehow not part of the Artemis cost since they have been underway for so long that NASA would be doing those things anyway without the whole Artemis thing. Back in the day NASA never included the costs of Shuttle flights in what it cost to build ISS since “we’d be flying them anyway”.
Somehow Artemis has become separate from the original “Vision for Space Exploration”, “Moon, Mars, and Beyond”, Constellation, “Journey To Mars” things – all of which are the overlapping, evolutionary, sequential steps that led to SLS and Orion – right? And all of these efforts cost billions – billions that have vanished from the overall humans to the Moon balance sheet. Of course if you really wanted to be accurate about what this cost you’d need to include Ares 1 and Ares V – since they were once NASA’s original “program of record” plan for sending humans to the Moon. But NASA wants everyone to forget all of those billions. Oh yes, then there’s the billion they spent on the J-2 testing – and the test stand they never needed – and … see where I am going?
When @NASA Deputy Administrator @jmorhard said today that it would cost a total of $35 billion for #Artemis to land humans on the Moon was he including the $16.2B cost of developing @NASA_SLS @NASA_Orion etc.? Apparently not. Source: https://t.co/adcWll23UU #Moon2024 pic.twitter.com/vOILRBgnSh
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) February 11, 2020
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Well, Artemis was announced half way into FY19 and the first landing may be in FY24. I guess the total for that would be around $70 billion according to the chart.
But the whole accounting process is really impenetrable. That chart shows the cost for the whole “Moon-to-Mars” business. Does “Science” belong in the cost of getting the next astronauts to the Moon? Someone might say that it’s just extra cost to enhance the value of Artemis, not directly required to land astronauts. How much of “Exploration Technology” and “Deep Space Exploration Technology” is for purely Mars-related work? Would the lunar work (i.e. the bare bones needed to get astronauts to the Moon) be cheaper if there was no intention of a sustainable presence after the first landing, and no effort to develop dual-use (Moon and Mars) technology and hardware?You can play games with questions like that, and get virtually any total cost you want.
That’s not unique to Artemis. I was just trying to look up the budget for SOFIA, terminated in the proposed budget, and see how it compared to other observatories like Hubble. It looks like it’s in the same ballpark. But it is a collaboration with DLR, and I can’t find numbers on the German contribution. I don’t know if the HST and SOFIA budgets cover similar things (e.g. to what extent they pay scientists to analyze the data, overhead for different processes for allocating observing time, etc.) Which line item covers civil service salaries are always ambiguous. Since being pinned down about the exact numbers can be inconvenient, I guess there isn’t a whole lot of motivation to straighten out this mess.
The US Congress and Administration has a long history of cancelling projects and thus losing all kinds of money which has already been invested. A prime example is the Apollo Moon Landing system, cancelled by the Nixon administration. The USSR I am sure dropped their collective jaws – after all they are still using their Soyuz, I am quite certain if they had made it to the moon first then they would still be using that system as well. Another example is the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, cancelled in 1993 by congress after an investment of $2 Billion.
Also, the CLCS new launch control system for the shuttle that was cancelled after $300 million had been spent.
But they all accomplished their primary mission of sending dollars to Congressional districts…
Exactly. That is why I asked what the total cost of putting humans on the Moon was – including SLS, Orion, etc.
If it is like the last 20 years, NASA can spend all they want and all Congress will give and it won’t make a difference if they get the poor management and poor contractor implementation of the recent past. Orion and SLS are a decade behind and tens of billions of dollars over budget and still have not flown. Once they do fly will they be successful or more like the recent CST100 Boeing flight which now requires redesign, rework, a re-flight and retest before they are ready for crew? The big contractors have learned that they make more money by putting poor implementers on the job and dragging the cost + contract out for as long as they dare. On the other hand if they want to get the job done they bring in someone like Space X which is motivated to succeed and for which cost is not the central issue.
Well, your question is designed to give a highly inflated answer, and so they probably didn’t want to answer it because of that. It appears that you are asking what it would cost to land one crew on the surface of the moon. In other words, incorporate all the development costs of all the programs – SLS, Orion, and the proposed surface lander – and so that cost would be the one to land the first crew on the moon. But once the first crew has landed, then the system is established, and so the next crew would be a fraction of the cost. So then the total cost would be almost halved. But that is too complicated for the modern day “sound-bites” that news outlets love.
I think a better question would have been two part: 1) once the Space Launch System, Orion, and the Lunar landing system is in operation, how much do you estimate a single lunar voyage to cost? 2) How much do you estimate it will cost to develop the SLS, Orion, and the Lunar landing system to the point where you will feel confident to launch the first lunar surface mission?
The fraction of cost for the next mission may still be too high, and a path to no where.
Doug loverro mentioned at the JSC all hands he expects about $20B total for HLS. And that to SLS/Orion yearly cost of what $3B and some suit money gets you close to an estimate. Full details should be coming to the hearings soon
“if you really wanted to be accurate”
When I got to the end of that sentence, Keith, I was expecting something different:
“if you really wanted to be honest”
It is true that governmental accounting can be opaque, but like all accounting it is subject to well-known rules. Somewhere.
The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board in Washington D.C. is the entity that “advises” on the rules for federal agencies.
When we’re done we’ll know the cost, and even then there’ll be much playing with definitions to get the desired answer (which’ll change daily).
Till then everything is a guess.
My prediction is that the final cost will be bigger than any expected funding.
In terms of history this would appear to be the largest NASA budget since 1969 during the Apollo era when it was at around $29.5 billion in 2020 dollars. The highest NASA budget was in 1966 when it was at about $46.8 billion in 2020 dollars. The lowest budget in the post Apollo era was in 1982 at $16.383 billion in 2020 dollars. The question is will NASA be as efficient in spending this money as it was during the Apollo Era.
This is just a budget request. No money for NASA has been allocated yet.
Yes, but it is the largest request since the Apollo era
The answer to how much it would cost NASA to get to the Moon in current planning is not all that difficult. The narrative that these cost numbers could be anything you want is promoted by internal NASA management (and many others) that is weary of all things cost. Contrary to cost getting more attention as it should for a sustainable space exploration program, all things costs became suspect under Gerst, his strategy of sowing confusion, and others gladly jumped on to the line “what number do you want?”
It’s pretty straight forward. Are you using SLS and Orion? Add that up. By the first landing on the Moon that’s what that cost to get there. Need a lander? Add that too to land there. A gateway? Add that in. Now, can you do another Moon landing a year later? Now we can take just the years budget difference and get just the recurring cost of the one additional landing. This is not rocket science. And yes, VAB’s are included because you included them as necessary to your plan. In what dreamworld would you not include the VAB? And so is support, and personnel, and the building they are in, and so on.
Amazing, we do rocket science, but all of a sudden NASA’s best and brightest blow a gasket when asked what something cost? Dream on if you think it’s because of difficulty, when really it’s more about lack of interest, and that disinterest is what can end up dooming these efforts.
As currently planned, where Constellation was Apollo on steroids, Artemis is flags and foot-prints on steroids, a twin sister. None of that is sustainable long term, as a program all just about national prestige is perhaps the weakest kind of space exploration program to have, just making a splash for a feel good moment. We have to do so much better, and different to really have a moment years from now where we stand back amazed at what we have accomplished.
Or you could do it the right way, by hiring commercial space to do it for a fraction of the cost NASA is spending on it…
I’m afraid it isn’t that straight forward. The accounting system makes it almost impossible for all the little things which probably add up to half the cost. Take the Deep Space Network as an example. I assume they will be using it to communicate with the astronauts on the Moon. Does that mean the whole operating budget for the DSN, plus the cost of any upgrades they make in the next few years, should be added to the cost of Artemis? That doesn’t make sense; the DSN supports dozens of robotic, scientific spacecraft. So what fraction of the DSN’s budget do you attach to landing astronauts on the Moon? The DSN does not charge users. They have an operating budget, a list of approved users and a process for allocating antenna time. The system just doesn’t allow you to extract how the costs are distributed among the users.
The same is true of the robotic spacecraft orbiting the Moon (LRO, the other ARTEMIS, etc.) They are primarily scientific satellites, but Artemis will certainly use and benefit from their data. Should some of their cost be attributed to Artemis? How about the high-power ion thruster the Gateway Power and Propulsion Element will use? It was developed for a number of possible applications, but Artemis is certainly using it. This may even go down to things like liquid oxygen for SLS. I presume they have some sort of liquefaction plant at KSC (or maybe CCSFS), but odds are it’s funded off the center’s operating budget. I doubt they charge users by the liter.
Could you change the accounting system and make it possible to know how much each program really costs? In theory. But attempts at full cost accounting have generally been a failure. For one reason or another it’s never been implemented across the board, and partial implementation has just made an even worse mess of things.
And don’t forget that the U.S. Navy will be using a LSD to recover Orion, with of course the usual USN and USAF units on call for supporting the missions. I imagine those costs are in the DOD budget as during Apollo.
I can’t imagine how that would look to someone trying to calculate a total project cost. It might even make Artemis look less expensive. I had a Cassini co-investigator at a Department of Energy lab, and we didn’t fund them by subcontracts (neither from the instrument PI institution nor JPL.) We had to authorize a fund transfer and ask NASA headquarters move money from the project’s budget to the DoE lab’s operating budget. I _think_ that actually made the Cassini project budget NASA was carrying look smaller.
Yes,and keep in mind that the U.S. Navy has already spent money on training excerises for recoverying the Orion, as well as recovering the test capsule on its flight. And do we want to add in the money the state of Florida and local communities spend on crowd control during a flight?
All those items from partial time on the DSN to a spacecraft (ask if it would exist otherwise, is it dedicated?) are easy numbers to find. Physics are far more complicated. We shouldn’t toss our hands up when the cost summary spreadsheet reaches 50 rows. More importantly, 80% of the cost if not more will be found in just the handful of more obvious items.
Comparisons are where things get interesting, a better path, a path not taken, a path that actually grows space exploration into space development – those should be the debate, currently pretty stifled.
I’ve tried to look up those numbers, and no, they aren’t easy to find. How many hours of DSN time did the Cassini project use in 2016? I worked on the project, and doubt I could find the number. What about the special requests (we really need the Canberra 70-m on the 22nd, could you delay regular maintenance until the 23rd?) Pulling that together across all users, and then attaching a dollar value to the time and other services isn’t easy.
For things like the lunar, robotic spacecraft, that’s also a problem, because their goals did mention human spaceflight. Finding lunar ice, as a resource, and landing site selections were on the list of objectives. But the way those goals are written, there’s no way to tell if that was a 10% extra or 90% of the reason the mission was funded.
And this may extend to some of the big ticket items. Congress wants Europa Clipper to fly on an SLS. When NASA put in that order for another ten SLS cores, there was talk about using some for an interstellar probe or an ice giant orbiter. And, given the long and convoluted history of SLS, someone could reasonably argue part of the motivation for developing it involved Mars or asteroid missions. So some people would argue with billing 100% of its costs to lunar landings.
Well the problem is it may not be administration’s intent to use SLS/Orion, they got saddled with these two lemons and can’t get rid of them without a big fight in congress. So they took the lemons and made lemonade, now you’re asking them to include the historical cost of these lemons in administration’s brand new program? That seems a bit unfair. For all we know, if the administration is free to act without congressional meddling, they would cancel SLS/Orion and use FH/Dragon instead, but they can’t, so if they had to include historical cost of SLS/Orion in their budget proposal they should be allowed to add a footnote saying “congress forced these on us, if we’re free to pick the optimal architecture, it would be much cheaper”.