28 thoughts on “Artemis Costs”

  1. (Copy of my disqus comment at parabolic arc)

    My take, FWIW. This is Bridenstine telling the White House they have three choices:

    – Forget the whole thing. Most likely outcome, IMO, but not certain.

    – Put a lot of political heavy lifting into getting the extra 20-30% NASA funding asked for here through the Congress.

    – Put a lot of political heavy lifting into changing the current conditions that cause Artemis to need that much extra funding: Congress’s current mandates that Artemis use SLS/Orion/Gateway, and that it be run by the existing NASA human spaceflight bureaucracy.

    If this White House decides it wants Artemis enough to do the heavy lifting, I’d strongly advise them that their success odds are far better working on changing the current conditions rather than throwing more money at the current setup.

    A last thought in that regard: Perhaps a grand political bargain with Congressional backers of the current SLS/Orion/HSF regional establishment, giving them equivalent regional funding from some other part of the government in exchange for releasing their stranglehold on NASA human spaceflight? Perhaps a DOD missile defense initiative, to employ a lot of the same regional engineering/tech talent? Fat early pensions meanwhile for much of the current HSF management? Pay the whole current boodoggle off so a new leaner NASA can form to do new and useful human spaceflight things affordably?

    Excuse me, was I dreaming out loud? So sorry…

    1. I did the same thing when I suggested that instead of obsoleting Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, they could transfer its production to Michoud, giving NASA affordable, reusable heavy lift, with all kinds of contractual non-compete agreements in place regarding commercial launches, etc.

      I’m sure NASA management thinks its one of the most highly optimized and logical structures there is, but I’d bet almost anyone in business could beat it, even relying on a Magic 8-Ball for personnel decisions.

      1. What would be in that for SpaceX? Falcon 9 is now their cash cow, and will be for quite some time.

        1. It is their current cash cow, but Elon thinks it will be rendered obsolete by Starship and Superheavy. I don’t really agree because I think those are oversized for the commercial launch market, but if they really drop the price point for launch costs, he might be right.

          So, taking him at face value, if he does intend to move away from Falcon, perhaps abandoning it entirely, it is still an almost ideal vehicle for much of NASA’s needs.

          1. Elon says that, sure. I wouldn’t be so certain about what he actually thinks, or how sure he is of it, or when he thinks it’ll actually for-sure happen.

            Even stipulating all that, why would he turn the F9 operation over to NASA as opposed to continuing to run it to sell them premium-priced legacy launches?

          2. To free up floor space, streamline operations, and allow him to move much of his production staff over to Starship and Superheavy, and let the rest go to work for NASA or whoever NASA chooses as a prime contractor.

            Basically, NASA is extremely inefficient and building rockets, or extremely bad at designing rockets for easy manufacture (But as Gleen says, behold the power of “and”). Yet they insist on building one particular rocket, the SLS, when they’d be better off cranking a proven design out like sausages using an established assembly method, and then focusing on upgrading its upper stages, customizing it for different roles, or whatever else they feel needs doing.

          3. –So, taking him at face value, if he does intend to move away from Falcon, perhaps abandoning it entirely, it is still an almost ideal vehicle for much of NASA’s needs.–

            Well, I think first stage of Falcon-9 and Heavy Falcon are almost ideal for NASA, and US military, and global satellite market.
            Kerosene for second stage seems more of simple and cheap solution. I would think Methane or Hydrogen is better for second stage or better in terms beyond Earth low orbit.
            Or I think kerosene seems better if gravity loss is an issue, and with leaving Earth, gravity loss is a significant issue.
            It’s not issue for Mars, Moon, and etc.

            A huge rocket is important in terms of how wide the payload can be.
            An advantage of Moon is one could large super, super wide payload- one can lift a city block or bigger {due to low gravity and no atmosphere}.
            If Moon is destination {and depends upon cheap rocket fuel at lunar surface- or if lunar water mining is profitable]
            then seem you need a new class of chemical rockets- rockets for Moon, Mars, Mercury, etc.. And with Moon they will probably be LH2 & LOX.
            With Earth anything launched has to be able to withstand high gees- payload and rocket itself. If launched from Moon it doesn’t need to even withstand 1 gee. And if moving about in orbit- Earth orbit to Mars orbit it could less, unless need stronger for aerobraking or simply high rocket thrust at perigee.
            So, I would say one need a different rocket for Mars settlements, but I would say such rockets are not blasting off from the Earth surface.
            But at the moment I don’t think we close to having Mars settlements, and could need rockets for Mars exploration program.
            We need to explore the Moon, to see how viable the Moon is in short term, and then explore Mars to determine if settlements could viable on Mars

        2. Part of the deal could be some sort of consulting agreement. NASA could pay SpaceX around $20 million a launch for consulting and technical services. That would allow NASA to feel like things aren’t changing so much and SpaceX wouldn’t lose any money.

  2. Re the comments from over at NASA Watch — he asks, “Why isn’t anyone in the U.S. excited about NASA going back to the Moon?” (Paraphrase of what Keith Cowing said is a question that needs answered.)
    Why not?
    For one thing, no one believes that NASA is capable of doing it. And so far, they’d be right.

    1. True dat. At least among the minority that even care.

      Well, mostly true. Not as often as I used to, but I still see occasional comments from true believers apparently convinced that NASA has piles of leftover freeze-dried Apollo stashed away. Just add money and stir, and zam, instant space program!

      1. I was amazed how many people that worked at NASA actually believed NASA had some hidden capability of equipment and resources to jumpstart any initiative. That’s the stuff that blew my mind when working there. It wasn’t the technological advancement that was amazing.

    2. That is definitely part of it.

      But I think it’s also that we have a populace so jaded that the prospect of putting Americans back on the Moon simply isn’t very exciting to many people now.

      1. No, I think that it’s simply that Lucy can only pull the football away so many times before even Charlie Brown catches on. I *really want* to get excited about Artemis, but the fundamentals haven’t changed in civil human spaceflight in decades. You can have Apollo-level budgets and go with the Apollo program structure, or you can dismantle the national arsenal for producing Apollo programs and go with today’s capabilities and system concepts rather than those of fifty years ago, or you can not go.

        I don’t think the higher budgets will materialize, and if they did, we would clearly have failed to put the program on a sustainable basis, because they wouldn’t last. And for decades, administrations have faced this choice and not chosen to start the political war necessary to reduce the overhead. That political fight would be extremely difficult even without partisan division in the legislative branch.

        There is no question in my mind that a human lunar return in five or six years is doable. In fact there are several ways to do it (which is why people can argue about it). But not if your first ground rule is “terminate nothing and close nothing”

        1. No, I think that it’s simply that Lucy can only pull the football away so many times before even Charlie Brown catches on.

          Oh, I think that effect is visible on space advocates and people in the industry.

          But I don’t think your average voter even *knows* about Constellation, the VSE, VentureStar, the SEI – any of it. I am not sure even how many congressmen know about any of them now.

          And maybe in theory you don’t need such a large level of popular support to jack up the funding or remake the POR into a commercial-based effort. But you are certainly going to need *something* to overcome entrenched parochial opposition to doing either.

          I don’t think the higher budgets will materialize, and if they did, we would clearly have failed to put the program on a sustainable basis, because they wouldn’t last.

          Agreed in full.

  3. It could be done for five billion or so total, if they don’t have to use SLS/Orion or the Gateway. Main expense is building a lander.

    So, it really isn’t that expensive. Cowling says they can’t get the money for it, but aren’t they already getting the money for it?

    You get an additional $5.6 billion every year.

    You have to subtract out what NASA already spends on SLS/Orion/Gateway to find the increase. It is one thing to say it will cost x over the next n years but that doesn’t mean all of it is an increase because NASA is already spending money on it. I could be wrong as I haven’t poured through any budget documents, but that is my quibble from the post.

    Moreover, to ensure that the Artemis program is not guaranteed to drop dead in 2021, NASA needs to equip it with a simple, internally – and externally consistent reason for being.

    This is a bit of a trap because a reason given will have endless detractors and while many reasons given should make the case stronger, the media will spin it as unfocused, confusing, or just focus on one aspect. Space related media has been just as bad as CNN and MSNBC when it comes to anything related to Trump. If the politicization of NASA ends up getting the Democrats to cancel SLS to spite Trump, that may be a good outcome but a bad way to get there.

    1. If they are getting 20 billion a year, why can’t they “find” 4-5 billion in their existing budget and repurpose it for the Moon landing?

      I guess I am totally naïve and clueless as to how this all works, but just asking.

      1. It’s a good and sensible question.

        In fact, NASA is currently spending over $4 billion a year on SLS/Orion, which are essentially useless. That $4 billion a year would indeed support a new Moon landing, if done with commercial launches (and commercially developed landers) rather than SLS, and if done outside the existing hidebound NASA human spaceflight bureaucracy.

        Short answer: The Congressional regional NASA human-spaceflight pork coalition refuses to allow either ditching SLS/Orion (plus Gateway), or managing the Moon project outside of the existing NASA human spaceflight bureaucracy.

    2. One thing to watch for here: The first couple billion a year of any actual increase will be hijacked by the SLS mafia to pay Boeing to develop the new 4x RL10 “Exploration Upper Stage” SLS needs to become SLS 1b and actually reach 100+ tons lift.

      More naked boondoggle pork, BTW. If they actually wanted an affordable 4x RL10 stage anytime soon they’d have given the contract to ULA, which actually builds and flies cryo upper stages. Boeing hasn’t done any such thing for decades.

      So, SLS $2G/yr, SLS launch site hardware $1G/yr, Orion $1.3G/yr, EUS $2G/yr… Billions more for the Rocket To Nowhere, into the indefinite future.

      1. Blue Origin’s BE-3U engine would surely be much cheaper than 4 RL10’s. Capable of 160,000 lbsf of thrust and deep throttling, it should be an easy pick. And by the time SLS block 1B flies, there should be plenty of flight data on it from all the New Glenn launches.

        1. Interesting. I hadn’t looked at BE-3u in a while. Originally it was to be a simple vacuum adaptation of the basic gas-generator BE-3, thus losing several tens of seconds of potential vacuum Isp. This I might guess handicapped it in competing with clustered expander-cycle RL-10’s for third-party applications.

          Just did a quick search, and now it seems BE-3u is to use some sort of expander cycle also, presumably to make it competitive with RL-10 on Isp.

          The downside of this: increased development time/cost/risk for BE-3u. “Currently testing” says https://www.blueorigin.com/engines/be-3 which is some developmental distance behind the original BE-3 (which of course is in flight service already.)

          The upside of course is that it’ll give New Glenn a significantly higher performance second stage (2x BE-3u is the current plan.)

  4. Money for nothing but talk. This might be building the foundation for bypassing NASA when it comes time to go back to the moon.

  5. I don’t think NASA could manage that much money in that much time. Forget about building a rocket; you increase budgets 3 fold, you can expect inefficiency. And that money has to go somewhere. In 5 years, can they hire enough trained labor with that spend rate? In 5 years, can they obtain that much quality raw material? This seems like someone did a study saying “we need X more people and Y more components to test and build” without considering what it would take to get X people and Y more material.

    I include Trump and Pence in not properly working this through, but I do think they are making a point that commercial space could probably reach this goal in 5 years, because they already have the talent, near proven designs, and a supply chain that is far more efficient. They can’t do much about procurement, because much of the regulation of procurement was created by Congress, which does have oversight in this area.

  7. I would also point out that Artemis will probably just commit to a warmed-over Altair lander left over from the Constellation program, or some related offering from legacy aerospace, and once the funding is in place and the contracts are issued, they’ll be committed to building another homage to the Apollo mission architecture.

    The Altair was planned to be able to deliver 14,500 kg to the lunar surface in cargo mode. The other day I was crunching numbers on a Starship that’s fully refueled in GTO, and what it could do, and whether it lands on the moon directly with its Raptor engines, or goes only into LLO to discharge a dedicated hypergolic lunar lander, it should be able to put 255,000 kg of cargo on the lunar surface (with the dedicated lander’s dry weight payload fraction at 75%). So a single Starship (refueled by other Starships at GTO) could be delivering 17 times more cargo per landing, while not throwing away any solids or big booster stages that have a four year lead time.

    If they pursue something like that, the payload capabilities and flight rate of the SLS will render NASA’s program completely irrelevant.

  8. At the end of the article, this part caught my eye;

    “Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), chair of the House Science Committee, noted the budget amendment included language giving NASA the ability to transfer funds from other agency accounts to pay for Artemis. That provision “would give the administrator carte blanche authority to move funds among NASA’s accounts from this year forward if he determines the transfers are necessary in support of the establishment of the U.S. strategic presence on the moon,” she said.

    “Why? Because the administration, it seems, may not request in the coming years what NASA actually needs for its crash program to get astronauts to the moon by 2024,” she added.”

    HRMMMM!!! If that’s in any way true, then the administration could indeed get the ability to terminate SLS, Orion, and Gateway to pay for Artemis. And that would be wonderful, even without the moon program part.

    BTW, for a lunar lander, I note that SpaceX’s Starship (both the hopper test vehicle, plus two orbital versions) are already taking shape, physically. They are being built. So, does that not put them ahead in the race vs. Altair or similar?

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