The Next President Should End NASA’s Space Launch System Rocket

The Next President Should End the ‘Senate’ Launch System Rocket

By Daniel Vergano

In the annals of U.S. pork barrel spending, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket towers over rivals like Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” or the U.S. Air Force’s $10,000 toilet seat, and not just on account of its eventual 365 foot height. At $5.7 billion for the first launch, a throwaway SLS rocket and its Orion capsule will costs orders of magnitude more than their reusable competitors per launch.

Those costs matter to the $25 billion space agency, which hopes in the next decade to return astronauts to the moon, deorbit the International Space Station, visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and much more. “For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Norman Augustine, chair of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) panel that released a report on NASA in September warning of risks to the agency’s future springing from a mismatch of its ambitions and means.

Unfortunately, business as usual is just what NASA has with SLS. Foisted on the Obama administration in 2010 by senators from NASA center states incensed about jobs losses after the space shuttle’s retirement, the “Senate” Launch System stands as a monument to Sunbelt socialism. Incredibly wasteful, each launch will throw away left-over reusable space shuttle engines—some of the most peerless technology ever built by humanity—making them dead ends as innovations.

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The next president should announce that NASA will swiftly transition away from this $23 billion white elephant, whose costs levels are “unaffordable,” according to space agency officials themselves. A similar gimlet eye should turn to the $20.4 billion Orion space capsules meant to ride atop those rockets, which, natch, at $1 billion apiece each possess heat shields of dubious safety. That’s despite plans to fling four astronauts around the moon inside one next year. NASA has put itself on the hook for at least six of them.

That next president should also announce an honest schedule for returning people to the moon, the Artemis program that serves as the raison d’etre of SLS and Orion. Constantly backsliding, these landings won’t be possible until the 2030s, and NASA should end the charade of them happening in this decade, reliant on dozens of complex new technologies working together. It ain’t gonna happen.

NASA is a national treasure, not a jobs program. The thousands of incredibly valuable NASA employees at centers in Alabama and Mississippi who know how to build space technologies should be turned to exploring such innovations for the sake of the American economy’s future. The Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, reusable rocket that paved the way for the reusable launchers of SpaceX and others was a 1990s U.S. Air Force and NASA project. There are just such urgently needed innovations in launch, maneuvering, orbital debris removal, space refueling, space power, and lunar and asteroid resource use, just to name a few areas, that could follow the Delta Clipper’s pioneering path in today’s growing space economy.

At the heart of the insane price increases for SLS systems is NASA’s reliance on “cost-plus” contracts for rockets and spacecraft, which a NASA Inspector General’s report in September blamed, in part, for a $6 billion increase in costs of the main engines of the jumbo rocket. Their “preposterously high” price of $100 million apiece, Ars Technica noted, is at least $80 million more than a comparable one made by private industry. These contracts give NASA contractors incentives to increase the costs to taxpayers of projects so as to increase their profits, as has reliably occurred for decades. NASA administrator Bill Nelson, no bomb-thrower, called cost-plus contracts “a plague” on the agency in 2022. They need to end.

Nelson was speaking to the culprits behind these odious arrangements, in Congress (including himself from his time in the Senate), who see the space agency as a piggy bank and cost-plus contracts as a way to deliver jobs to constituents and share price boosts to campaign funders. For lawmakers, cost overruns are a feature, not a bug, ones they can pontificate over while cackling privately about taxpayer boodle swindled to well-connected contractors. Pragmatists might argue, and have, that SLS is just the graft umbrella that allows NASA to launch wonders like its Mars rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in its shade—democracy in action. Scientists however can see its real costs in foresworn science, like the just-canceled VIPER lunar rover, its loss defanging the science from Artemis, and the eaten seed corn of technology development dwindling at the space agency. (“When you are facing many near-term challenges as NASA does, many near-term mission issues, it’s very hard to not neglect the future,” Augustine noted while releasing the NASEM report.) Not to mention, the imported cost-plus culture of constant cost overruns, which as seen with JWST put the space agency on the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk” budgeting list.

Winding SLS down will give NASA time—and money—to plan a realistic moon program, one that moves astronaut landings into the doable 2030s, instead of the continuously backsliding fantasy dates that the agency has promulgated for this decade. Not only will SpaceX have cheaper reliable jumbo rockets capable of lunar flights by then, but private competitors like Blue Origin and the United Launch Alliance will as well, letting the market and fixed-price contracts salve NASA’s bottom line. The extra time will allow for assured development of reliable landers and precursor science (current plans call for landing a SpaceX rocket standing up on the uncertain lunar surface), led by the NASA centers moving away from SLS, as well as a critical examination of the actual need for a lunar orbit “Gateway” space station planned to support landings.

Make no mistake that earlier dates are fantasies: September brought news that even the mobile launcher needed for the SLS moon launches is over budget by more than $2.3 billion dollars, and will be least six years late, to at least 2029. Don’t hold your breath on that date.

In 2020 former NASA administrator Charles Bolden told Politico that SLS would “go away” in this decade, because commercial firms would build “a much cheaper” rocket. That may well happen, but it won’t without a push from the next administration. The Potemkin program needs winding down, whoever wins, setting the space agency on a course for fostering innovation in a space industry facing increasing global competition

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.