NASA Is Studying A Manned Trip Around The Moon On A $23 Billion Rocket (buzzfeed.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on NASA's ongoing work on a manned trip to the moon. From the report: Without a new administrator even nominated yet, NASA's acting head Robert Lightfoot on Wednesday requested a study of whether next year's first flight of the Space Launch System rocket, billed as the most powerful NASA has built, could have a crew of astronauts. "I know the challenges associated with such a proposition," Lightfoot said in a letter to his agency, citing costs, extra work, and "a different launch date" for the planned 2018 Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1). The mission would be launched by the massive SLS, which is still in development, then boosted by a European service module to put three astronauts inside the new Orion space capsule on a three-week trip around the moon. NASA first sent three astronauts around the moon in 1968 in the Apollo 8 mission. The last astronaut to stand on the moon, the late Gene Cernan returned to Earth in 1972. The new talk of a repeat moon-circling mission, aboard an untested spacecraft, has space policy experts variously thrilled, dismissive, and puzzled. "I frankly don't quite know what to say about it," space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University said. Writing on NASAWatch, Keith Cowing called the study request a "Hail Mary" pass to save the life of the SLS ahead of Trump installing a budget cutter to head the space agency. The Government Accountability Office estimates the costs of SLS and its two planned launches (a second, crewed mission is planned for 2023) at $23 billion.

Comments

Re:How much to re-create Apollo?

[queazocotal]

"would we save $BIGBUCKS by building on what we have instead of starting nearly from scratch?".

In short - often no.
Nobody sane thinks that you can launch SLS for under 2 billion dollars per launch.
This is a launch cost of $30000 per kg of payload.

Falcon 9 can launch the same payload (admittedly split into several) for $5000/kg.
Falcon heavy (debut flight expected within several months) launches can currently be bought for around $1500/kg.

SLS 'benefited' from congress - who at best have a passing knowledge of rocketry, but a very good knowledge of who makes existing hardware in their constituencies mandating that it use shuttle components.

If you can get - for the same launch cost - not 70 tons, but 1400 tons to orbit, even if they are in 54 ton, not 70 ton lumps - it starts being really questionable what the benefit of the 'shuttle derived' heritage is buying you.

I note also that SpaceX has an at least credible plan to get launch costs down from the above $1500/kg to $30/kg or so, in a totally reusable vehicle.
At this sort of cost, it becomes insane not to entirely reevaluate your lunar strategy.

For example, it may become entirely reasonable not to use a lightweight aluminium-lithium stir-welded composite structure which is indeed very light, but requires months of engineering to design and costs millions, but instead a half inch thick decent aluminium structure that costs tens of thousands.

Boy, that is a STUPID idea.

[hey!]

Good thing that's not what they're actually doing.

If you read the actual GAO report, it doesn't say the rocket costs twenty-three billion. That's the cost of "the first planned SLS flight, the ground systems for that effort, and the first two Orion flights." In other words the costs to meet certain early program milestones, including costs which should properly be amortized across the lifetime of the rocket and crew vehicle.

The actual per launch cost of just the SLS system is supposed to be about $500 million, or 2% of the $23 billion figure.

That's still a lot of money. Even if you go with expendable costs of half a billion, and billions for the whole mission for sure, well, it's a lot of money just to prove you still have big balls. Not that that's completely unimportant, but I'd like to know what the manned component does for the mission besides make it more complex and expensive and therefore a more impressive demonstration of our manhood.