Twelve years after it was first announced, NASA’s massive Space Launch System will finally make its public debut. The heavy-lift rocket and Orion spacecraft will begin firing at the launch pad at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, a highly anticipated development for a launch system that has suffered from delays and price hikes.
After Thursday’s launch, which is expected to last 11 hours, NASA will conduct a large number of tests to determine launch readiness, such as validating software systems and maintaining the boosters. NASA then begins a “wet dress rehearsal,” a series of additional pre-launch tests, where the system is loaded with its own fuel tanks. Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis’ launch director, told reporters during a media appeal Monday that the wet dress could be done on April 3, if it rolls out as expected.
It’s a long time ago. Congress instructed NASA to develop an SLS in 2010 to replace the Space Shuttle, the agency’s original backbone of spaceflight. The SLS is intended as a way to return humans to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, and possibly further into the solar system.
But since then, the project has regularly faced setbacks and technical difficulties. A year ago, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General issued: damning report In terms of costs and contracts associated with the SLS program, it found that “incremental costs and delays” pushed the total project budget beyond its original range. The biggest winners of this group are undoubtedly the aerospace firsts — notably Boeing, which is leading the development of the SLS, and Northrop Grumman and Aerojet, whose contracts accounted for 71% of the total funding spent on all SLS contracts in 2019, it said. the inspector. general.
All this made for a very expensive project. In early March, a NASA auditor reported that operating costs for the first four Artemis missions would be $4.1 billion each. The cost to build one SLS is about half that, or $2.2 billion. It appears that NASA’s Associate Director of Exploration Systems Development, Tom Whitmaier, is implicitly commenting on the price tag, telling reporters that the project is a “national investment.”
In my opinion it is a solid national investment [and] International participation in our economy.
The high price of the SLS is partly due to the fact that neither stage of the SLS is reusable, so each mission needs its own missile. Unlike the SLS, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk estimated last month that his company’s super-heavy, fully reusable rocket, Starship, would cost less than $10 million per launch in the coming years. SpaceX is developing a version of the rocket for NASA as part of the Artemis program, after winning a $2.9 billion contract for that mission last year.
–
