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The December sunrise felt hopeful as we were outside, watching NASA’s Orion spacecraft storming into the Florida sky. We could imagine that the United States was taking its first tentative step into the future of human exploration of the cosmos.
“This is the beginning of the Mars era,” said space agency administrator at the time, former NASA astronaut Charlie Bolden, shortly after launch in December 2014. And at the time, who could argue ? Here was a spaceship capable of flying to the Moon and back, conducting its first test in space.
Six years later, some of the glitter is gone. Years of waiting an encore for that flight have worn away much of the enthusiasm that followed this Exploration Flight Test-1 mission. We were supposed to have seen a new Orion flight two years ago and a mission that would take astronauts around the Moon next year. Instead, Orion is unlikely to fly back into space before 2022, at the earliest.
And as for the first time astronauts will get on board the Orion, who can say? The pitch keeps sliding to the right.
An inefficient process
The Orion spacecraft dates back to 2005, when NASA issued a “request for proposals” to industry with the goal of “developing a new Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2014 that is capable of transporting astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. “. NASA looked to Orion as a building block to get humans to the Moon as part of what became known as the Constellation program. This show was later canceled, but Orion survived.
Since that time, according to Casey Dreier of The Planetary Society, NASA has spent $ 23.7 billion developing the Orion spacecraft. This does not include the primary costs of the vehicle’s service module, which provides power and propulsion, as it is provided by the European Space Agency.
For this money, NASA obtained a basic version of Orion that flew during the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014. The agency also secured the construction of an Orion capsule, which also does not have a full life support system. to be used during the unmanned Artemis I mission to be flown in 12 to 24 months. So, over its lifetime, and for $ 23.7 billion, the Orion program has produced:
- Development of the Orion spacecraft
- Basic Vehicle Exploration Flight Test-1
- The Orion capsule for another test flight
- Work in capsules for later missions.
Obviously, that is nothing. But it is far from being a lot, even for a large government program. To see how efficiently this money could have been spent in theory, let’s use an extreme example.
SpaceX is generally considered one of the most efficient space companies. Founded in 2002, the company has received funding from NASA, the Department of Defense, and private investors. Throughout its history, we can reliably estimate that SpaceX has spent a total of $ 16 billion to $ 20 billion on all of its spaceflight efforts. Consider what that money has bought:
- Development of the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets
- Development of the Cargo Dragon, Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft
- Merlin, Kestrel and Raptor rocket engine development
- Construction of launch sites at Vandenberg (twice), Kwajalein Atoll, Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center
- 105 successful launches to orbit
- 20 missions to supply the International Space Station, two manned flights
- Development of vertical take-off, vertical landing, rapid reuse for early stages
- Starship and super heavy rockets development program
- Starlink Internet Program (with 955 satellites in orbit, SpaceX is the world’s largest satellite operator)
In short, SpaceX delivered all of that for billions of dollars less than what NASA has spent on the Orion program since its inception.
Flat budgets
Yet in his analysis of the costs of the Orion program, Dreier does not disparage Orion, NASA, or the spacecraft’s prime contractor, Lockheed. “I tend to have a bit more understanding of Orion,” he said. “Its cost and pace are a feature, not a mistake.”
The United States Congress, which has a huge role in setting space policy due to its budgetary power, simply does not intend for NASA to go particularly fast with the development of Orion. Dreier noted that Congress has funded Orion on a relatively flat budget for the past decade, averaging about $ 1.6 billion per year. During the Apollo program, when NASA had a clear goal and deadline to reach the Moon, annual funding for the Apollo Command and Service Module peaked at more than $ 7 billion a year. This allowed for rapid development.
Orion, by contrast, is a coalition-supported program. One of these is political, requiring funding to be geographically distributed and therefore shared among many NASA field centers and subcontractors. A fixed budget also allows for a stable workforce for several years. In contrast, with a private company, resources can be abruptly shifted from one program to another and jobs terminated.
Orion has also had to wait for the Space Launch System rocket. Although the capsule was launched on a private Delta IV Heavy rocket in 2014, Congress has said that it must be launched on the SLS thruster for future missions. The SLS rocket is another program hampered by flat budgets and the need to provide many jobs over many years, and it is also long overdue.
The SLS rocket will likely not be ready before early 2022, if not later. Congressional insistence on the use of the SLS has prevented NASA from formally considering launching SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, or even its new Super Heavy booster, for manned Orion missions. Both rockets would offer much lower cost, the potential for reuse, and multiple missions per year.
A predictable outcome
So how will the incoming Biden administration view Orion? Currently, as part of the Artemis program, Orion will transport astronauts from Earth to lunar orbit, where two to four people will enter a separate lander, descend to the surface of the Moon, and then return to Orion for the return trip. to the earth. . Such a mission could take place in 2026 or so, with sufficient funds.
This moment has echoes of 2008, when the incoming Obama administration took on the Constellation program to return humans to the Moon and found it over budget and far behind. This transition team was led by Lori Garver, who would become the deputy administrator of the space agency, and convened a panel of experts led by Norm Augustine to review Constellation. “Our concerns were confirmed by Augustine’s panel of experts,” he told Ars. “After full deliberation, the Administration requested the cancellation of the program, including Orion.”
However, this effort was eventually rejected by Congress. The Orion program survived and NASA was told to begin building the SLS rocket in 2010. NASA was also instructed to fly the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014 to show “progress” into deep space.
“The same intense industry and lobbying by NASA that led to the government’s decision to extend Constellation contracts created Exploration Flight Test-1 as an attempt to show progress during what we knew would be a very long development period.” Garver said. “Recognizing that our hands were tied and preferring progress to longer battles, we reached an agreement to secure Congressional funding for the commercial crew program and moved forward with both programs.”
Ultimately, the commercial crew, thanks to two flights this year of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon vehicle, proved it was worth the investment. Meanwhile, NASA and its contractors have spent the last decade working on Orion and the SLS vehicle for deep space missions. Those programs are advanced enough, Garver said, that NASA should have a chance to show if they work.
“I look forward to seeing the SLS and Orion fly as soon as possible and urge that the lessons learned from the experience be incorporated into future NASA programs,” Garver said. “The workforce and the public deserve no less.”
The take-home message for lawmakers is pretty simple, Garver said. Public-private partnerships and fixed-price contracts like those for commercial crew have been shown to work, and expensive, time-consuming, and higher-cost programs like Orion and SLS should be avoided in the future if possible.
