NASA’s newest rocket is a colossal waste of money

Editor’s note: On August 29th, a couple of hours before the scheduled take-off, NASA postponed the launch of Artemis because of engine problems. The agency’s next opportunity to send the rocket into space would be on September 2nd. Scientists, engineers, policymakers and space fans have waited over a decade for the SLS’s maiden launch. They will have to wait at least a few more days.

In his new book, “The Crux”, Richard Rumelt, a professor of business strategy, writes about a conversation he once had with an air-force colonel. What, Mr Rumelt asked, is the perfect fighter jet? The colonel replied: “The perfect design would have contractors in each state and a part made in each congressional district.” The tale is told after Mr Rumelt has described the waste and incoherence of nasa’s Space Shuttle programme—something he blames squarely on Congress.

Alas, Congress never learns. On August 29th or soon after, more than a decade after the shuttle programme came to an end, nasa will test its newest rocket for the first time. The Space Launch System (sls) is the first step in the agency’s Artemis programme, which aims to take humans back to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars. sls is the successor to the Space Shuttle and heir to the legendary Saturn V rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon.

It is also a colossal boondoggle. The conception and execution of the project has been a near-perfect example of pork-barrel politics. The result is a rocket that privately built models will probably outclass soon after its maiden launch. Don’t blame the scientists and engineers at nasa for the debacle, though. The fault lies, once again, with Congress.

The Space Shuttle was cancelled by President George W. Bush in 2004. The following year, nasa announced the vehicle’s successor—the Constellation programme. This was tasked with completing the International Space Station and returning humans to the Moon by 2020 and Mars at some point thereafter. By 2010, Constellation’s costs had ballooned so much that President Barack Obama decided to cancel it. The contracts for the programme’s development, however, had already been doled out to various aerospace companies, as well as some nasa institutes. In what Lori Garver, a former nasa official, calls “the relentless momentum of the status quo”, the sls programme was created in 2010 to ensure that contracts from the defunct Constellation programme kept going.

Developing the sls has cost American taxpayers around $23bn in the past decade. Over the same period, the commercial-launch industry has boomed—Elon Musk’s SpaceX, for instance, has shown it is possible to build reusable rockets that can send astronauts and cargo into space for around $50m per launch, far less than the projected $2bn (or more) for each ride aboard the sls. Within the next six months, SpaceX will put Starship into orbit. Its biggest rocket yet, the heavy-lift vehicle will be able to carry similar payloads into space as the sls for, Mr Musk reckons, just a few million dollars a launch. Given the increasing competition from companies such as Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, it is hard to see a role for nasa’s bloated sls.

Pork barrels may be good politics, but they are lousy ways to advance technology. If Congress cared about space science, the rocket programme would therefore be scrapped. nasa would concentrate instead on defining the mission architecture for the Artemis programme and buy in transport where needed. This was an idea floated in 2019 by Jim Bridenstine, then the nasa administrator, who also argued that private rockets could get Artemis to the Moon sooner than the sls.

Likewise, President Joe Biden’s administration should aim to target nasa’s efforts at the things only it can bring about and for which there is not already a market: high-risk scientific research; technology for space missions that push the limits of current knowledge; or finding better ways to understand and monitor global threats, such as climate change. Just a fraction of the $23bn spent on the sls could make an enormous difference.

Were nasa stripped of pork, it might slip down Congress’s list of priorities and hence suffer budget cuts. But if lawmakers are not interested in a rational approach to space, so be it. There is no God-given reason for nasa to be as large as it is.

It is telling that the seeds for America’s flourishing commercial space industry were sown by the same nasa administration that got lumbered with the sls. In 2010 Ms Garver and her colleagues decided to accept a compromise with the sls in order to eke out a small percentage of the Constellation money to finance their real goal: to support private-launch startups and drastically reduce the cost of getting people into low-Earth orbit. That bet paid off handsomely. SpaceX, for example, would have got nowhere without it. How perverse for nasa to fail to reap the benefits of that gamble and for Congress to insist on sticking to the old ways. ■