NASA Keeps Asking for Billions for SLS But Will Not Measure and Control Costs

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The SLS is the world’s most powerful rocket and will enable NASA to return humans to the moon. NASA requested $11.2 billion in the fiscal year 2024 president’s budget request to fund the program through fiscal year 2028, in addition to the $11.8 billion spent
developing the initial capability.

NASA) does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of its most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS). After SLS’s first launch, Artemis I in November 2022, NASA plans to spend billions of dollars to continue producing multiple SLS components, such as core stages and rocket engines, needed for future Artemis missions. The program is also concurrently producing hardware for more capable versions of the SLS, the Block 1B and Block 2, for use on later missions.

Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable. The SLS program developed a roadmap outlining short-term and long-term cost-saving strategies for future missions.

The SLS program evolved from NASA’s Constellation program—the human exploration effort intended to succeed the Space Shuttle. NASA cancelled the Constellation program in 2010 due to a number of factors including cost and schedule growth and funding gaps.

The Constellation program had pretty much the same contractors as SLS. NASA and the same companies pissed away about nine billion on Constellation and also is and will waste billions more on SLS.

The whole point of Constellation and SLS was to rearrange mostly Space Shuttle components into an Apollo rocket configuration.

Neither the 5-year production and operation cost estimate nor the annual budget requests are a substitute for a cost baseline, and are poor tools to measure cost performance over time. As of July 2023, the program has not updated its 5-year production and operations cost estimate to reflect the current expected costs for the SLS program. Without regular updates, cost estimates lose their usefulness as predictors of likely outcomes and as benchmarks for meaningfully tracking progress. As a result, it is unclear what the current estimates are to produce SLS hardware covered by the fiscal year 2024 budget request.

The GAO added that it is seeing signs of cost growth on the SLS even as it moved into production. It noted a contract includes nearly $2 billion for the costs of producing the SLS core stages for the Artemis 3 and 4 missions. “Based on our analysis of the contract, the cost to produce successive core stages is increasing over time,” the report stated, but did not quantify the increase.

The RS-25 is a liquid propellant engine that powers the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The SLS uses four RS-25 engines, which produce more than 2 million pounds of thrust. The RS-25 modernized and refurbished RS-25 engines built for the Space Shuttle program. The current cost of manufacturing a new RS-25 main engine is about $100 million. NASA and Aerojet are trying to reduce the cost by 30% by the end of the decade. These RS-25 engines are slightly modernized and refurbished RS-25 engines that were built for the Space Shuttle program. The current cost of making one new RS-25 main engine is about $100 million. NASA and Aerojet are trying to reduce the cost by 30% by the end of the decade. However, the planned $70 million cost are “savings” that do not include overhead and other costs, which are currently estimated at $2.3 billion.

The SpaceX Raptor 3 was recently test fired and reached 18% more thrust than a Raptor 2. The Raptor 2 had 25% more thrust than the Raptor 1 and it was 20% lighter.

I have estimated the weight savings and other parameters of the Raptor 3 and speculated on the further weight, thrust and chamber pressure for a future SpaceX Raptor engine. The newest SpaceX Raptor engine has about 593,000 pounds of thrust. Raptor engines cost less than $1 million and SpaceX has a goal of $250,000 to 300,000 in cost per engine.

Weight reduction of the entire rocket and improved electronics and other systems will improve the cost and overall performance of future SpaceX Starship rockets.

SpaceX Raptor engines are more powerful and less than 1% of the cost of the RS-25 engines.

The entire SpaceX Super Heavy Starship with 42 total engines over two stages is less cost than one RS-25 engine before adding in overhead and other costs.

8 thoughts on “NASA Keeps Asking for Billions for SLS But Will Not Measure and Control Costs”

  1. NASA’s big problem is that it went from purpose driven to vendor driven. Add to that the bureaucracy and risk-aversion – spending on things that don’t add anything but look great on paper (to bureaucrats) and you have a recipe for spending more on everything. SpaceX has now shown that the emperor has no clothes, hopefully this will push NASA into competitive mode, but I doubt it. More likely they will just stick to “give use more money or we won’t do anything” mode.

  2. Just so I’m clear: SpaceX’s starship can’t go beyond Earth’s orbit without refueling, right? Who’s going to pay for that, and how will it happen, and when?
    The SLS looks like it’ll be ready for Moon launches well before all that happens, if ever.

  3. The real question is what did Boeing and Lockheed do with all that money? The whole program cost for this launcher for all the way back in Bush I administration is $40 billion or more and they only launched one rocket consisting of shuttle engines and shuttle solid rocket motors. Basically, the only thing they had to make was a tank to stick them on and some small amount of code to operate it. Most of which already existed for their other rockets. $40 billion! That’s a lot of cash for them having nothing to show for it of any consequence.

    People complain about Tesla subsidies but the same subsidies and much, much more were given to the auto companies and Boeing-Lockheed. The difference is for the subsidies we gave Musk we got real value. I found this quote,

    “…Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support…”

    This is total subsidies for ALL of his companies as of 2015 and worth every penny.

  4. A bit unfair. NASA was never intended as a productive, leading-edge, dynamic, for-profit space company – but merely a placeholder for the skills, knowledge, and PR that allows a space industry to happen – like most Universities. You don’t build a university to do great things and change the world, but merely filter and develop those who haven’t yet achieved intellectual and economic viability – realizing that the vast majority of students and schools provide mediocre lifetime value. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have more than a few years of intense skill development, post grade-12, as you move from a secondary school into a workplace with an intensive mentorship program. Since very few dynamic work places can afford or support such a program (outside of Europe), we are forced to create a generic University system (and other post-Grad fluff) to transition high value students to productive work.

    • Government do nothing projects and do nothing jobs do not contribute to the economy. Any business that turns a profit contributes value. SpaceX satellite launches are profitable. NASA satellite launches are not profitable.

      Federal legitimate expenses are justice, stable currency, security, secure borders. The government fails justice by attacking political opponents of the president. The currency is a tatters. The borders are open.

    • In an alternate universe where there was no Elon Musk or SpaceX, this program would represent the standard, the best we could do. Russia would have done nothing new for decades. China would have just copied NASA. Congress and NASA anre amazingly robust in their ability to demonstrate that human Spaceflight is an impossibly expensive, pointless, technological dead end stunt. STS and SLS might very well have succeeded in killing off the human experiment with Spaceflight before it ever matured. Without SpaceX, with just Boeing and another Legacy Aerospace contractor handling the commercial crew program – it would have just helped to hammer home the hopelessness of the enterprise.

      • Probably something similar would have happened with electric cars if not for Tesla. All the automakers were making crappy little compliance vehicles, then shrugging and saying what can we do, people don’t want them. Then Tesla forced the issue and they had to compete.

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