NASA Finally Admits What Everyone Already Knows: SLS is Unaffordable, and Starship Update
Freeman writes:
FAA grounds Starship until SpaceX takes 63 'corrective actions'In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program.
"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.
[...]
NASA recently said that it is working with the primary contractor of the SLS rocket's main engines, Aerojet, to reduce the cost of each engine by 30 percent, down to $70.5 million by the end of this decade.However, NASA's inspector general, Paul Martin, said this claim was dubious. According to Martin, when calculating the projected cost savings of the new RS-25 engines, NASA and Aerojet only included material, engineering support, and touch labor, while project management and overhead costs are excluded.
And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.
Arthur writes:
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
"The vehicle's structural margins appear to be better than we expected," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joked with reporters in the wake of the late April test launch. Per the a report from the US Fish and WIldlife Service, however, the failed launch resulted in a 385-acre debris field that saw concrete chunks flung more than 2,600 feet from the launchpad, a 3.5-acre wildfire and "a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site."
"Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices," the FAA release reads. Furthermore, the FAA says that SpaceX will have to not only complete that list but also apply for and receive a modification to its existing license "that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch." In short, SpaceX has reached the "finding out" part.
[...] "SpaceX is also implementing a full suite of system performance upgrades unrelated to any issues observed during the first flight test," the blog reads. Those improvements include a new hot-stage separation system which will more effectively decouple the first and second stages, a new electronic "Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system" for its Raptor heavy rockets, and "significant upgrades" to the orbital launch mount and pad system which just so happened to have failed in the first test but is, again, completely unrelated to this upgrade. Whether those improvements overlap with the 63 that the FAA is imposing, could not be confirmed at the time of publication as the FAA had not publically released them.
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