Three months ago, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the space agency was making a major pivot from building a space station in lunar orbit to a base on the surface. This \u201cIgnition\u201d event followed an earlier announcement in which NASA also said it was ending development of a new upper stage for its Space Launch System rocket.<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of these decisions, there was some grumbling\u2014mostly from contractors involved with the programs\u2014that NASA was foolishly walking away from nearly complete hardware that the space agency needed for its Artemis Program.<\/p>\n
Isaacman said these programs were not essential for landing humans on the Moon and added that they had cost far more than originally budgeted and had been subjected to years of delays. Moreover, they were still not ready.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor too long we tried to satisfy every stakeholder,\u201d he said during the Ignition event in March. \u201cBillions of dollars wasted. Years lost. Hardware that never launched. Fewer flagship science missions. And fewer astronauts in space, which means fewer kids dressing up as astronauts for Halloween. I don\u2019t like it. The president doesn\u2019t like it. The American people have waited long enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, NASA\u2019s Office of the Inspector General prepared a memorandum on the elements of the Artemis Program that NASA was canceling as its focus shifted to the Moon\u2019s surface. These were:<\/p>\n
The memorandum notes that each of these projects has experienced substantial cost increases and numerous delays over the last decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the course of their life cycles, the combined contract values for these efforts ballooned from nearly $2.8 billion to $5.9 billion and NASA extended their contracted delivery dates by up to seven years,\u201d states the report by the inspector general. \u201cHowever, our projections indicate that if NASA allowed work to continue to completion, the systems would have cost more and taken longer than what was on contract.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
In a written response to the report, the chief of NASA\u2019s Human Spaceflight Directorate, Lori Glaze, said the data in the memorandum support NASA\u2019s decision to cancel these programs earlier this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cNASA notes that the challenges summarized in the memorandum\u2014cost growth, schedule slips, contractor performance issues, and evolving mission requirements\u2014reinforce the rationale behind the decisions publicly announced during Ignition Day to streamline the Artemis architecture, modernize acquisition practices, and align programs with the nation\u2019s objectives for sustained lunar presence,\u201d Glaze wrote.<\/p>\n
The least expensive of the four contracts, for the Universal Stage Adapter, is perhaps the most illustrative. NASA contracted with Dynetics in June 2017 to design, test, and build this piece of spaceflight hardware. Made largely of composites, the adapter weighed 9,650 pounds (4.3 metric tons) and stood 33 feet (10 meters) tall.<\/p>\n
The original contract awarded to Dynetics totaled $131 million, to which NASA later added $9 million for a payload separation system. At the time the program was canceled earlier this year, the contract value had grown to $353 million, with a delivery date delayed to September 2028. The inspector general\u2019s report projected that the project would likely cost $497 million and not be ready until May 2030.<\/p>\n
To be clear: NASA was likely going to pay half a billion dollars for a relatively straightforward stage adaptor. This doesn\u2019t have propulsion or anything like that on board. Also, for some unfathomable reason, it was likely to take 13 years to build.<\/p>\n
Another interesting note from the report is that the inspector general did not believe the Lunar Gateway, based on delays with the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, would have been operational until at least 2032. Ars reported last week that NASA formally asked Northrop Grumman to stop work on this module.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three months ago, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the space agency was making a major pivot from building a space station in lunar orbit to a base on the surface. This \u201cIgnition\u201d event followed an earlier announcement in which NASA also said it was ending development of a new upper stage for its Space Launch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[304,9475,190,21],"class_list":["post-43960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-artemis","tag-inspector-general","tag-nasa","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}