NASA’s obstacles to commercializing the Space Launch System are mounting

Reuters reports that NASA is urging Boeing and Northrop to commercialize the Space Launch System (SLS). On the surface, it’s a good strategy. The SLS is horrendously expensive to process and launch. If the monster rocket’s two main contractors can find other customers, the launch cost will decline. Cost cutting is an important consideration, thanks to the pressure on NASA’s budget because of the debt ceiling deal. The planned House Appropriations Committee 2024 spending levels could be devastating to the space agency.

Currently, the Space Launch System costs about $2 billion to launch. The goal is to bring the costs down to $1 billion per launch. But who would want to spend a billion dollars to launch anything on NASA’s monster rocket except for the space agency?

The Space Force certainly doesn’t want anything to do with the Space Launch System. Colonel Douglas Pentecost, a senior rocket acquisition official with the Space Force, is quoted as saying, “It’s a capability right now that we, the DoD, don’t need. We have the capability that we need at the affordability price that we have, so we’re not that interested in some partnership with NASA on the SLS system.”

It’s not going to get any better in the future. The military and commercial customers have the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy and soon, the Vulcan to launch payloads. Eventually, the SpaceX Starship and the Blue Origin New Glenn will be able to toss heavy payloads into space at a fraction of the Space Launch System’s cost.

The problem with the Space Launch System lies in its origins. Because President Barack Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation Program angered Congress on both sides of the aisle, NASA was obliged to enter into a “Faustian bargain.” NASA agreed to build a heavy-lift rocket in exchange for the Commercial Crew program. Thus was born the Space Launch System, whose purpose was as much to provide jobs to constituents and fat contracts to campaign contributors as it was to launch things into space.

The Space Launch System was years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget before it launched the wildly successful Artemis I mission. However, Artemis II, which will launch a crew of astronauts around the moon, will occur no earlier than late 2024, about two years after Artemis I. Artemis III is scheduled for no earlier than late 2025, a year after Artemis II. As Reuters explains, the SLS is very challenging to build, another impediment to commercialization.

NASA and Congress, which funds it and its programs, are faced with two painful options.

The first option is for Congress to swallow hard and fund the Space Launch System. After all, Congress imposed the SLS on NASA. Congress continued to insist that the heavy-lift rocket be part of the Artemis return to the moon program, expense be damned. The legislative body would be hypocritical to suddenly discover that the SLS is a money pit just at the moment when it is inclined to cut the federal budget.

The second option would be to find some alternative to the Space Launch System to take astronauts to lunar orbit. The idea of using the SpaceX Starship to not only land on the moon but to take astronauts from the Earth to the moon has been discussed elsewhere. The beauty of the option is that it would drop the cost of a human lunar exploration campaign by orders of magnitude. Lunar expeditions will also likely occur more frequently than once a year or once every two years. Elon Musk has predicted that Starship may cost as little as $10 million a flight and will launch “hundreds of times” before it even carries people.

Several obstacles exist to a switch from the Space Launch System to the Starship. For one thing, the SLS that will be used for Artemis II is already under construction. Some of the engines for the Artemis III mission, the first moon landing in over 50 years, have been delivered. Even if NASA retires the SLS, it will still be the center of the first few missions to the moon,

NASA is paying for unwise decisions made over a decade ago. If the space agency means to decrease the cost of returning to the moon, it has few if any good options. The space agency needs to act sooner rather than later.

Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.