The next president should scrap NASA’s Space Launch System rockets

The next president should shut down the Senate rocket launch system

Daniel Vergano

In the history of U.S. profit-driven spending, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket towers over rivals like Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere and the U.S. Air Force’s $10,000 toilet seat. And not just because it will ultimately reach a height of 365 feet. At $5.7 billion for its first launch, the disposable SLS rocket and its Orion capsule are orders of magnitude more expensive per launch than their reusable competitors.

Those costs pose a major problem for the $25 billion agency, which plans to return astronauts to the moon, deorbit the International Space Station, visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and more over the next decade. “This is not a time for business as usual for NASA,” said Norman Augustine, president of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, who released a report on NASA in September. The committee warned of risks to the agency’s future arising from a mismatch between ambition and means.

Unfortunately, what NASA is doing with SLS is business as usual. The “Senate” launch system, foisted on the Obama Administration in 2010 by NASA heartland senators outraged by job losses after the Space Shuttle was retired, is a monument to Sunbelt socialism. It’s incredibly wasteful and a dead end as an innovation, as every launch discards the Space Shuttle’s remaining reusable engines, some of the most unparalleled technology humanity has ever developed.

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The next president should announce that NASA will quickly move away from this $23 billion junkyard, whose cost levels NASA officials say are “unaffordable.” Similarly, a sharp look should be directed at the $20.4 billion Orion space capsules that will be aboard these rockets, which, of course, cost $1 billion each and have heat shields of questionable safety, even though the plan is to orbit the moon with four astronauts in a single capsule next year. NASA now has to pay for at least six of the heat shields itself.

The next president should also announce an honest timeline for returning humans to the Moon, the Artemis program that is the reason for the existence of SLS and Orion. Plans are constantly being set back, and these landings won’t happen until the 2030s. NASA should stop pretending it will rely on dozens of complex new technologies working together to make the landings happen this decade. It’s not going to happen.

NASA is a national treasure, not a jobs program. Thousands of highly valued NASA employees in centers in Alabama and Mississippi who know how to build space technology should be directed toward exploring such innovations for the future of the U.S. economy. Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X), a reusable rocket that paved the way for reusable launch vehicles such as SpaceX, was a U.S. Air Force and NASA project in the 1990s. There are many urgently needed innovations in today’s growing space economy that can follow Delta Clipper’s pioneering path, including launch, piloting, orbital debris removal, space refueling, space power, and lunar and asteroid resource utilization.

The root of the SLS system’s extraordinary price hike is NASA’s reliance on “cost-plus” contracts for rockets and spacecraft, which a September report from the NASA Inspector General attributed to a $6 billion increase in the cost of the giant rocket’s main engines. Ars Technica noted that the “exorbitantly high” price of $100 million per engine is at least $80 million higher than comparable contracts from private industry. These contracts give NASA contractors an incentive to increase taxpayer dollars on projects to boost their profits, and they have done so reliably for decades. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, no bombshell, called cost-plus contracts a “plague” on NASA in 2022. Cost-plus contracts need to end.

Nelson was speaking to the culprits behind these odious arrangements in Congress (including Nelson himself, as a senator), who see space agencies as merely piggy banks and cost-plus contracts as a way to give jobs to their constituents and boost campaign donors’ stock prices. To lawmakers, cost overruns are a feature, not a flaw, something they can boast about while chuckling inside about the largesse of taxpayer money being scammed by well-connected contractors. Pragmatists might, and have, argued that SLS is merely a bribe umbrella that allows NASA to launch incredible spacecraft like the Mars Exploration Rover and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) under its shadow. This is a sign of democracy. But scientists can see the real cost of SLS in abandoned science like the just-cancelled VIPER lunar rover, in the weakening of the Artemis program’s science, and in the drying up of seeds of technological development in the space agency. (“When you face as many near-term challenges, as many near-term mission problems as NASA does, it’s very hard not to ignore the future,” Augustine said in releasing the NASEM report.) Needless to say, the imported cost-plus culture of constant cost overruns, as seen with JWST, has landed the space agency on the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s “high-risk” budget list.

The wind-down of SLS would buy NASA the time and money to plan a realistic lunar plan that would push back the landing of astronauts to a feasible 2030s, rather than the ever-retreating fantasy date NASA has publicly touted for the past decade. By then, SpaceX will have a cheaper, more reliable, larger rocket capable of lunar flights, as well as private competitors such as Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, and the market and fixed-price contracts would help salvage NASA’s bottom line. This extra time would allow for robust development of reliable landers and precursor science led by NASA centers moving away from SLS (current plans call for a SpaceX rocket to land upright on the uncertain lunar surface), as well as rigorous consideration of the actual need for the lunar-orbiting “Gateway” space station planned to support the landing.

Don’t get me wrong: Any earlier date is an illusion. In September, news broke that even the mobile rocket needed for the SLS moon launch is more than $2.3 billion over budget and will be delayed by at least six years, to 2029. Don’t get your hopes up about that date.

In 2020, former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Politico that SLS will be “gone” within a decade because private companies will build rockets that are “much cheaper.” That could well happen, but only with pressure from the next administration. Whoever wins, Project Potemkin will need to be ended, and the space agency must move in a direction that fosters innovation in an increasingly globally competitive space industry.

This is an opinion and analysis article and the views of the author are not necessarily those of Scientific American.