How to pare back unsustainable costs
NASA officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that they were concerned about the costs of the SLS rocket.
“NASA recognizes the need to improve the affordability of the SLS program and is taking steps to do so,” the report states. “Senior agency officials have told us that at current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable and exceeds what NASA officials believe will be available for its Artemis missions.”
Officials from the space agency said they had a four-step plan to reduce costs of the SLS rocket program over time:
- Stabilize the flight schedule
- Achieve learning curve efficiencies
- Encourage innovation
- Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
Setting aside that some of these goals sound suspiciously like corporate speak, the report makes clear that these are aspirational aims for now. “NASA, however, has not yet identified specific program-level cost-saving goals which it hopes to achieve,” the authors write. “NASA has made some progress toward implementing these strategies, but it is too early to fully evaluate their effect on cost.”
Can NASA really control costs?
While NASA certainly deserves credit for talking about the excessive cost of the SLS rocket—a fact that has been pointed out by critics for more than a decade but largely ignored by NASA officials and congressional leaders—it is not at all clear that they will be able to control costs. For example, 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.