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Junk Cost Estimates Supplied to Augustine Committee Threaten to Sink NASA's Human Spaceflight Program
by Robert Zubrin — last modified 2009-08-29 12:27
The Mars Society has examined copies of the cost projections being used by the Augustine Committee in currently considering the future of NASA's human spaceflight program. These estimates, generated by the Aerospace Corporation, a US Air Force funded policy oracle, have no scientific basis and have clearly been composed to make the case that human space exploration is unaffordable.
A copy of the Aerospace Corporation's bizarre cost estimates being used by the Augustine Committee is available here.
Examining the Aerospace Corp's cost estimates we see they claim an insane development cost of the Ares 5 heavy lift vehicle of $35 billion dollars, and assign a development cost of $28 billion for a somewhat lower capacity Shuttle-C type launcher. Both of these incredible estimates are about a factor of 7 higher than what is generally believed in the industry to be necessary for the development of such systems. In fact, in testimony delivered directly to the committee ( Video; Slides), SpaceX president Elon Musk offered to develop a heavy lift system for $2.5 billion, and I myself have seen Lockheed Martin presentations which estimate their cost to develop a heavy lift (150 tons to LEO) launcher at $4 billion.
The cost projections for all other systems are similarly bloated, or worse. A particularly nonsensical example can be seen in the Aerospace Corp's cost estimates for future ground operations. As the charts correctly note, these today amount to about $300 million per year to support the flights of the highly complex Space Shuttle. Following retirement of the Shuttle, Aerospace's cost estimates have ground operations cost triple to $900 million by 2012, and then continue to rise to $1.8 billion by 2022. This sixfold rise in ground operations cost would be difficult to explain in any case, but in the absurdity of this instance is outstanding since during the entire ten year 2012-2022 period in question, there are NO heavy lift flights at all for the ground operations to support. In other words, the Aerospace Corp's estimates have NASA's ground operations costs rising sixfold over Shuttle flight support requirements, spending $15 billion over ten years, in order to launch nothing.
Rather than basing their projections on actual grounded estimates of development costs for different types of hardware, what the Aerospace Corporation appears to have done is to regard each program element as an "activity" which each need to be funded continuously at multi-billion levels per year. The program is then arranged so that no flights beyond LEO can take place before around 2023. So, with a budget of about $3 billion per year (equivalent to 30,000 employees on payroll) the Ares 5 development program is allowed to run for 12 years, bringing development costs to the spectacular $36 billion level. Why, in this day an age, a launch vehicle development program needs to run 12 years (or require 30,000 people) is left unexplained. In contrast, the Saturn V development, done at a time when much more still needed to be learned about launch systems, took only 4 years to complete (Contract awarded in 1962, first flight in 1966.) Summing up all such activities the net result is a program which costs $14 to $20 billion per year (140,000 to 200,000 employees) and which does nothing at all for a decade.
The Augustine Committee may believe that by accepting such estimates they can push the Obama administration into supplying more funds to NASA. However the program they propose is so unattractive that the more likely result is that they will simply cause cancellation of the human exploration effort. Indeed, presented with a choice of accepting the Committee's recommended plan of spending a quarter trillion dollars over 15 years in order to do a year 2025 human rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, retrenching to a purposeless ISS-visit only astronaut program, or just bagging human spaceflight altogether, the administration could hardly be blamed for choosing one of the latter options.
Americans want and deserve a space program that is actually going somewhere. In order for that to happen, a radically different methodology to that being accepted by Augustine Committee needs to be employed. Rather, a real goal, worthy of spending serious money on, if necessary, needs to be selected. That goal can only be humans to Mars. Then a minimum cost, minimum complexity, and, critically, fastest schedule plan needs to be selected to achieve that goal. In order to minimize schedule and cost, such a plan should avoid advanced propulsion, on-orbit assembly, or other futuristic ideas, and instead get the job done in the manner of the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct missions by employing a strategy of direct transportation to Mars of required payloads using an upper stage mounted on the heavy lift launcher.
Once a plan is selected, request for proposals (RFPs) for development of each major hardware element needs to be put out to industry, with the completion date on each timed to make them all available in concert. So for example, rather than viewing the heavy lift vehicle (HLV) development as an "activity" to run for decades funded at $3 billion per year, with initial use anticipated sometime in the 2020s, an RFP should be issued offering up to $5 billion for development of an HLV with a specified capacity with work to be completed within 5 years. (This is not a particularly novel method of procurement - many major NASA and military systems have been developed in precisely this way.) If such an RFP were offered, all the significant aerospace industry players would bid, and, the HLV would be developed by the winner for under $5 billion. If each of the other primary elements of a Mars program (hab module, Mars ascent vehicle, trans-Mars injection stage, aerobrake and lander module, surface power system) were also bid out in similar fashion, the result would be a humans to Mars program costing under $40 billion, with first flight possible before the end of Mr. Obama's prospective second term.
That is the option that needs to be presented to the president.
Examining the Aerospace Corp's cost estimates we see they claim an insane development cost of the Ares 5 heavy lift vehicle of $35 billion dollars, and assign a development cost of $28 billion for a somewhat lower capacity Shuttle-C type launcher. Both of these incredible estimates are about a factor of 7 higher than what is generally believed in the industry to be necessary for the development of such systems. In fact, in testimony delivered directly to the committee ( Video; Slides), SpaceX president Elon Musk offered to develop a heavy lift system for $2.5 billion, and I myself have seen Lockheed Martin presentations which estimate their cost to develop a heavy lift (150 tons to LEO) launcher at $4 billion.
The cost projections for all other systems are similarly bloated, or worse. A particularly nonsensical example can be seen in the Aerospace Corp's cost estimates for future ground operations. As the charts correctly note, these today amount to about $300 million per year to support the flights of the highly complex Space Shuttle. Following retirement of the Shuttle, Aerospace's cost estimates have ground operations cost triple to $900 million by 2012, and then continue to rise to $1.8 billion by 2022. This sixfold rise in ground operations cost would be difficult to explain in any case, but in the absurdity of this instance is outstanding since during the entire ten year 2012-2022 period in question, there are NO heavy lift flights at all for the ground operations to support. In other words, the Aerospace Corp's estimates have NASA's ground operations costs rising sixfold over Shuttle flight support requirements, spending $15 billion over ten years, in order to launch nothing.
Rather than basing their projections on actual grounded estimates of development costs for different types of hardware, what the Aerospace Corporation appears to have done is to regard each program element as an "activity" which each need to be funded continuously at multi-billion levels per year. The program is then arranged so that no flights beyond LEO can take place before around 2023. So, with a budget of about $3 billion per year (equivalent to 30,000 employees on payroll) the Ares 5 development program is allowed to run for 12 years, bringing development costs to the spectacular $36 billion level. Why, in this day an age, a launch vehicle development program needs to run 12 years (or require 30,000 people) is left unexplained. In contrast, the Saturn V development, done at a time when much more still needed to be learned about launch systems, took only 4 years to complete (Contract awarded in 1962, first flight in 1966.) Summing up all such activities the net result is a program which costs $14 to $20 billion per year (140,000 to 200,000 employees) and which does nothing at all for a decade.
The Augustine Committee may believe that by accepting such estimates they can push the Obama administration into supplying more funds to NASA. However the program they propose is so unattractive that the more likely result is that they will simply cause cancellation of the human exploration effort. Indeed, presented with a choice of accepting the Committee's recommended plan of spending a quarter trillion dollars over 15 years in order to do a year 2025 human rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, retrenching to a purposeless ISS-visit only astronaut program, or just bagging human spaceflight altogether, the administration could hardly be blamed for choosing one of the latter options.
Americans want and deserve a space program that is actually going somewhere. In order for that to happen, a radically different methodology to that being accepted by Augustine Committee needs to be employed. Rather, a real goal, worthy of spending serious money on, if necessary, needs to be selected. That goal can only be humans to Mars. Then a minimum cost, minimum complexity, and, critically, fastest schedule plan needs to be selected to achieve that goal. In order to minimize schedule and cost, such a plan should avoid advanced propulsion, on-orbit assembly, or other futuristic ideas, and instead get the job done in the manner of the Mars Direct and Semi-Direct missions by employing a strategy of direct transportation to Mars of required payloads using an upper stage mounted on the heavy lift launcher.
Once a plan is selected, request for proposals (RFPs) for development of each major hardware element needs to be put out to industry, with the completion date on each timed to make them all available in concert. So for example, rather than viewing the heavy lift vehicle (HLV) development as an "activity" to run for decades funded at $3 billion per year, with initial use anticipated sometime in the 2020s, an RFP should be issued offering up to $5 billion for development of an HLV with a specified capacity with work to be completed within 5 years. (This is not a particularly novel method of procurement - many major NASA and military systems have been developed in precisely this way.) If such an RFP were offered, all the significant aerospace industry players would bid, and, the HLV would be developed by the winner for under $5 billion. If each of the other primary elements of a Mars program (hab module, Mars ascent vehicle, trans-Mars injection stage, aerobrake and lander module, surface power system) were also bid out in similar fashion, the result would be a humans to Mars program costing under $40 billion, with first flight possible before the end of Mr. Obama's prospective second term.
That is the option that needs to be presented to the president.
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