After Spending Billions of Dollars on SLS, NASA Admits Its Moon Rocket Is ‘Unaffordable’
Gizmodo.com | 09/08/2023 | Passant Rabie

A new report accuses the space agency of a lack of transparency regarding the cost of its SLS program.

NASA has come under heat for the increasing cost of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which space agency officials have finally admitted to being unsustainable and unaffordable, a new report revealed.

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Thursday that heavily criticized NASA for its lack of transparency regarding the true cost of the SLS program, which has already gone $6 billion over budget.

The SLS rocket launched 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.

In 2014, GAO had recommended that NASA establish cost and schedule baselines for the Artemis program. Instead, the space agency “created a rolling 5-year estimate of production and operations costs to ensure that the costs fit within NASA’s overall budget,” GAO wrote in its report. That initial estimate, however, does not reflect the cost of the SLS program over time. As a result, ongoing production and other costs that followed the launch of Artemis 1 are not monitored.

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 a report released in May by the office of NASA’s inspector general.

NASA 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.”

I’ve heard that SpaceX has launched 60+ rockets this year and they are landing the boosters each time and reusing them.