What matters is what NASA can do with the annual budget its given by Congress and the tax payers.

Once the Space Shuttle was operational, annual funding for the program was around $3 billion a year for four or five flights per year. So that would be about $600 million to $750 million per flight. NASA likes to say that the cost of the Shuttle was around $450 million per launch– but that was only during the year when NASA launched eight Space Shuttles in just one year.

There will be no economic competition for crewed NASA flights into space since there won’t be enough crewed launches demanded by NASA for any such economic competition over the next decade or two.

NASA will be strictly focused on the safety of its astronauts– no matter what the cost! And right now it looks like the ULA is going to have a huge advantage over Space X as far as Commercial Crew safety is concerned.

Marcel

There are so many holes in that statement I don’t know where to start. So I won’t even try.

You are ignoring the difference between fixed and total cost.

When I was working on the program it’s total budget was around $3B. The overwhelming majority of that was fixed cost, that is the cost to be able to fly at all. The incremental cost to fly was so relatively small that whether it flew one time or six times was lost in the rounding error.

We always got a good laugh at press accounts saying the shuttle cost/flight was:

(1) $750M/flight – when it flew four times.
(2) $600M/flight – when it flew five times.
(3) $500M/flight – when it flew six times.

That relationship exists in every other launcher system, also for Airlines, Railroads, and Trucking Services.

The higher figures you quote are based on throwing in the cost of everything anyone could find (a good example being the cost to the DoD to build a never used Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg) assuming worst case inflation scenarios and adding amortizing those inflated sunk cost in the yearly operations..

This sophistry may make you feel good, but the same sorts of games could be played with the Falcon 9 if SpaceX did not keep so much information secret.

You can play these games as much as you want. Nobody that knows anything about the subject, is ever going to believe you.

The shuttle system and its two disasters proved that for now, it is very risky to combine very large payloads with crew launches. By separating them, crew escape systems, which the shuttle shamefully lacked, are again feasible.

In addition, the current prices for astronaut seats will be lowered due to simple competition, once reusable rockets can land reliably. This could be within 2 years, or before astronaut flights on US boosters resume.

The SLS is Congress’s baby and they expect it to be used. And it should launched at least twice per year (I would prefer four times per year for a lunar program)

The fixed cost for the SLS will probably be around $3billion dollars per year– even if NASA never launches another vehicle after 2021.

So it would be enormously expensive for NASA to always be prepared to use the SLS– but to never use it!

Marcel

O’Keefe was actually very successful (at least in my opinion) in the political sense as NASA Administrator. What he needed was a good technical type as his Deputy.

Unfortunately what he got was Steidle who was out of his element. After they proposed a “fly off” of two different full up orbital vehicles for $1B and then had to retract it, the Admiral appeared “snake bit”.

He refused to make another final decision and would instead continue to “broaden the trade space” (i.e. keep sending the technical people who brought the results of one trade study back to do at least two more trade studies). .

I remember running into a co-worker who was involved and asking how things were going. She replied: Well Joe, we are diverging on a solution.”

Griffin (had he not already decided on the 1 1/2 launch scenario from a Planetary Society Study he led) might have been a good Deputy.

Too Bad.

As it is if things continue down the NewSpace road I do not expect to see humans leave Earth orbit again in the quarter century or so left of my lifespan.

If a group of space advocates were to form a Mothers Against Drunk Drivers type organization with a simple mission statement it might accomplish something. The problem is, of course, the space advocates themselves.

“So damn those stupid space advocates! All they do is argue!”

Back then Chinese were faced with land based threats such as the Mongols, and their ships though impressive were limited by having to stay close to shores (not ocean going navigation). Gunboats from Europe were not even envisioned.

We can see the same thing these days. Back in Apollo days, missiles and rockets were the serious threat. We see the US pouring enormous amounts of resources. There were some budgets posted by Dennis Wingo that showed the huge amounts in tens of billions just in development of Atlas, Titan, etc. of each!

Now the “threat” is terrorism in addition to info/cyber so enormous amounts of resources are poured into countering that which does not include rockets.