From/by Bloomberg, October 17:
The Artemis program — years behind schedule and billions over budget — should have taxpayers and presidents demanding answers.
By Michael R. Bloomberg
Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board.
There are government boondoggles, and then there’s NASA’s Artemis program.
More than a half century after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety.
As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.
The problems start with the mission, which is more political than scientific. There is little humans can do on the moon that robots cannot. Technology has come a long way since 1969, to put it mildly. We do not need another person on the moon to collect rocks or take scientific measurements. And the costs of putting people on the moon — and of planning for their potential rescue, should complications arise — are truly astronomical.
To understand the level of wasteful spending, forget the $1 billion in spacesuits that have yet to be delivered. That’s pocket change compared to the rocket, called the Space Launch System. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s inspector general estimates the program has so far burned through $23.8 billion. Each launch will likely cost at least $4 billion, quadruple initial estimates. This exceeds private-sector costs many times over, yet it can launch only about once every two years and — unlike SpaceX’s rockets — can’t be reused.
Even if the Space Launch System is completed, there’s a hitch: It isn’t even powerful enough to actually get anyone to the moon, at least not in its current configuration. It will instead deposit its capsule, called Orion, into what’s called near-rectilinear halo orbit. Here, the capsule — which, despite $20 billion being poured into it, currently has a faulty heat shield — must rendezvous with a landing spacecraft, which will then take the astronauts to the lunar surface. And getting the landing spacecraft into orbit, before it can be propelled toward the moon to meet Orion, is itself a complex process.
Simple, Artemis is not. A lot could go wrong. And that’s before NASA adds its new space station into the mix. Known as the Gateway, it will cost more than $5 billion to build, require perhaps $1 billion in annual maintenance and has no clear rationale. The idea is that, in future missions, Orion might dock at the Gateway, two astronauts will exit and board the lander, and the remaining crew will sit in the station and observe their colleagues collecting rocks.Unfortunately, that’s not all. To build Gateway, NASA is adding a second stage to the Space Launch System, called Block 1B, that is six years behind schedule, expected to cost $5.7 billion and will add about $1 billion to every launch. To accommodate Block 1B, the agency is erecting a new launch tower called ML-2, which is expected to cost $2.7 billion, more than seven times initial estimates, and doesn’t have a plausible completion date. (The company building ML-2 has billed the government for 850,000 overtime hours in the past two years.)
A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon — no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required — at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving....
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