🚀 NASA’s Space Launch System rocket program simply makes no sense

What really are we doing here, Washington?

Quote of the Issue

“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” - Elon Musk in Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

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The Essay

🚀 NASA’s Space Launch System rocket program simply makes no sense

“If China gets to the moon before we do again, it will be a Sputnik moment,” Elon Musk told three NASA officials at a dinner back in February 2022, as recounted in the new biography by Walter Isaacson about the car and space entrepreneur. “It’s going to be a shock when we wake up and realize they got to the moon while we were suing each other.”

Anyone as interested in America’s lunar ambitions as Musk is no doubt shaking their head in frustration at a new Government Accountability Office report on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which is supposed to be the backbone of the space agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program. None of the GAO’s conclusions are good news if you’re somehow still expecting Artemis to become a de facto sequel to Project Apollo and its dozen or so missions to the Moon.

The GAO sees SLS as facing serious challenges due to high costs and delays. Furthermore, NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of the program and a reliable baseline to measure its performance, according to the report. Then there’s this zinger: “Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable.”

Of course the SLS is unaffordable — the rocket is cobbbled together with Space Shuttle components and Apollo-era development and operational practices — as a previous government report made clear earlier this year. “We found that the first four Artemis missions will each cost $4.1 billion per launch, a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said during a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics back in May.