A new report accuses the space agency of a lack of transparency regarding the cost of its SLS program.
on November 16, 2022 for the Artemis 1 mission, sending an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back. The 5.75-million-pound rocket is essential to NASA’s Moon program, with plans to launch Artemis 2 in late 2024 followed by the first crewed landing on the lunar surface as early as 2025 and another one tentatively set for 2028.
“NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of its most powerful rocket, SLS,” GAO’s report read. “After SLS’ first launch...NASA plans to spend billions of dollars to continue producing multiple SLS components.” Those components include core stages and RS-25 engines currently being built by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Each rocket launch requires four engines and two boosters; one RS-25 engine currently costs around $100 million to manufacture.
NASA’s massive Moon rocket has been a budgeting nightmare. The projected cost of each SLS rocket has gone over budget by $144 million through Artemis 4, increasing the overall cost of a single Artemis launch to at least $4.2 billion, according to aNASA officials that spoke to GAO acknowledged that at current cost levels, the SLS program is “unaffordable,” and “unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions.
In an effort to decrease the cost of the SLS program over time, the space agency is working to implement these strategies: stabilizing the flight schedule, achieving learning curve efficiencies, encouraging innovation, and adjusting acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk.The report shows skepticism over NASA’s game plan moving forward. “NASA, however, has not yet identified specific program-level cost saving goals which it hopes to achieve,” GAO wrote in its report.
NASA is also considering other options, like operating SLS under a launch service model whereby the space agency would purchase future launches and payload capabilities from a contractor who would own, operate, and integrate the rocket, according to the report.There is a lot riding on the SLS rocket and NASA’s planned return to the Moon, therefore the space agency is highly motivatedifferent trajectory in order to still be able to deliver the Orion capsule on its way to the Moon.
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