Cost of Moon Landing Estimated at $20 to $30 Billion
Jim Bridenstine (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
CNN talked to the NASA administrator about the cost of landing astronauts on the moon by 2024.
>The space agency will need an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion over the next five years for its moon project, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told CNN Business on Thursday. That would mean adding another $4 billion to $6 billion per year, on average, to the agency’s budget, which is already expected to be about $20 billion annually.
Bridenstine’s remarks are the first time that NASA has shared a total cost estimate for its moon program, which is called Artemis (after the Greek goddess of the moon) and could send people to the lunar surface for the first time in half a century. NASA wants that mission to include two astronauts: A man and the first-ever woman to walk on the moon.
The $20 to $30 billion cost estimate is less expensive than some had predicted — though they’re not necessarily the final figures. Bridenstine acknowledged that spaceflight can be dangerous and unpredictable, so it’s practically impossible to settle on an accurate price tag.
“We’re negotiating within the administration,” he said. “We’re talking to [the federal Office of Management and Budget]; we’re talking to the National Space Council.” (The National Space Council is a recently revived policy development group headed by Vice President Mike Pence.)
Assuming the amount is indeed all new funds and doesn’t include what’s already being spent on Orion, SLS and other programs, the only way to meet the deadline would be through a combination of increases to NASA’s budget and cuts to other parts of the space agency’s budget.
It should be noted that members of the House, which is controlled by Democrats, have thus far rejected significant cuts in other NASA programs as they have worked through the space agency’s fiscal year 2020 budget. The Republican Senate has not weighed in yet.
The other thing the story suggests is that the $1.6 billion in supplemental spending the Administration has requested for NASA’s budget is likely too low. Especially if the Senate follows the House’s lead in rejecting cuts from other agency programs.
32 responses to “Cost of Moon Landing Estimated at $20 to $30 Billion”
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That number seems about right.
This’ll be Jim’s big test. Let’s see if he can get the money.
I can’t imagine that he will. The last time NASA got a topline $2-3 billion increase to its annual budget was nearly 30 years ago, and he’s asking for more – or for the power to potentially cut money from other programs for this, which will be unpopular. They get maybe a billion extra a year sometimes, and that’s mostly when an existing program is running over budget.
Probably just nothing is going to be happening until ISS is gone along with its funding requirements. Assuming that happens, and the pro-ISS folks in NASA and elsewhere don’t talk NASA into keeping funding for it while they try and find commercial partners.
Jeff, it’s about right using cost plus contracts with OldSpace (SLS), but, IMO, way over priced using fixed price/agreed performance contracts with NewSpace (around ten billion). Regards, Paul.
he wont Jimmy B is a small child
Given that we have to ignore that Starship is likely to start prototype test flights this year or 2020 and that the enormous Super Heavy is soon to follow, let’s make the Artemis goal 2025 (to take out the 2024 political aspect) and then let’s do it.
If SS/SH ends up taking a number of years to get going and then to work the kinks out, Artemis will have been money well spent. If SS/SH progresses quickly and/or if Artemis faces almost inevitable delays, well, we’ve been throwing money down the toilet for years anyway. Might as well try to actually accomplish something.
I mean, I dunno; I’d be doing this whole damn thing differently, but as long as we’re stuck with SLS/Orion and an international partnership for a Lunar Gateway, let’s go ahead and get a lander and suits done and let’s get down there
NASA has to have partners onboard who can influence the current administration, the next administration and twice as many Congresses. That means Boeing and LM have to have work. If I were putting this forward, I’d have a dual track program. The ‘primes’ track, and the ‘irregulars’ track. Have them race each other, yet also make their systems interoperate. So NASA designs interfaces, the ‘primes’ and ‘irregulars’ design the systems inbetween. That way you can take advantage of the speed and dynamism of the ‘irregular’ crowd, and Boeing and LM get the share of the budget they’re going to get anyway.
That seems to me to be the way NASA is playing this. It’s really their only chance at success.
its hopeless…they wont get the money
Except the legacy primes and their Congressional backers don’t want to share and certainly don’t want to get beaten to the finish line in a formal race. They would never go for such a proposition de jure. But, as P.K. Sink said, we’re pretty much already doing this de facto. That’s a better way to go, IMHO. Everything of importance related to Artemis is likely to be decided in the next 20 months.
Except it’s not really a race since Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are going to the Moon regardless of what NASA is doing. Congress’ inability to fund a NASA return just makes Old Space firms that much more irrelevant while clearing the way for NASA to buy lunar “services” when they are available.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I see things working out. By early 2021, Trump will be starting his second term. SLS won’t have launched. The NASA lander program under legacy contractor auspices will already be behind schedule if it has started at all. But SHS will already have flown to Earth orbit and will be busily launching gobs of Starlink birds every few weeks. At that point, the Artemis “program of record” will be ripe for a change roughly comparable to jacking up the radiator cap and driving a new car underneath.
I stopped reading at Starship …blah blah blah
the fantasy is great with you
You do a pretty good impression of two of the famous three monkeys. You need to work on the hands-over-mouth one though.
It’s nice to know that the decedents of those who laughed at the Wright Brothers and told Mr. Ford to get a horse are still around and kicking ?
Then don’t read
“That would mean adding another $4 billion to $6 billion per year, on
average, to the agency’s budget, which is already expected to be about
$20 billion annually.”
Sounds like a real world budget. But that dooms closure of the effort to 2030+. For the reasons stated above. That kind of budget increase is not going to happen.
Depends on the next administration.
it could be sold, but it would have to be sold as an infrastructure bill…and well thats not what it is
My take, FWIW. This is Bridenstine telling the White House they have three choices:
– Forget the whole thing. Most likely outcome, IMO, but not certain.
– Put a lot of political heavy lifting into getting the extra 20-30% NASA funding asked for here through the Congress.
– Put a lot of political heavy lifting into changing the current conditions that cause Artemis to need that much extra funding: Congress’s current mandates that Artemis use SLS/Orion/Gateway, and that it be run by the existing NASA human spaceflight bureaucracy.
If this White House decides it wants Artemis enough to do the heavy lifting, I’d strongly advise them that their success odds are far better working on changing the current conditions rather than throwing more money at the current setup.
A last thought in that regard: Perhaps a grand political bargain with Congressional backers of the current SLS/Orion/HSF regional establishment, giving them equivalent regional funding from some other part of the government in exchange for releasing their stranglehold on NASA human spaceflight? Perhaps a DOD missile defense initiative, to employ a lot of the same regional engineering/tech talent? Fat early pensions meanwhile for much of the current HSF management? Pay the whole current boodoggle off so a new leaner NASA can form to do new and useful human spaceflight things affordably?
Excuse me, was I dreaming out loud? So sorry…
I think you nailed the options…the problem is that 1) the poltical heavy lifting is not a specialty of this administration 2) the Dems in Congress have no incentive to go along and 3) Jimmy B couldnt manage the lunch order
and in the end…well there is no political support for this thing
Well, I did mention that “forget the whole thing” is the most likely outcome. It’s true of any White House that they have limited resources to apply to a lot of issues. Historically, letting government space continue largely as-is has been the rule, major WH intervention a one-off exception (that required a number of extraordinary circumstances to happen.)
As you allude to, the work-with-Congress-to-fund-this-puppy option is particularly unlikely given the current open partisan warfare between the WH and the House. (Leaving entirely aside the growing general understanding that funding any major existing-NASA HSF initiative is a mug’s game, as the way to bet is bog-down into protracted one year-per-year delay for billions per year.)
The remaining (albeit still unlikely) possibility is that this WH might become annoyed enough at institutional NASA’s soggy response so far that they decide to make a high-profile and publicly-resonant point demonstration of “draining the swamp” built around this Moon initiative. At that point, the amount of political heavy lifting they might undertake (not to mention the tactics they might adopt) could be quite surprising.
Not the way to bet, of course. Some variant of “forget the whole thing” is most likely. (The classic version of that, maintain the nominal goal but leave it largely unfunded, is what I’d put my money on if forced to bet.)
Henry…I was rereading some “notes” on the politics that surrounded the acceptance of the space station as a “program”…it is interesting the political capital that the REagan administration had to expend to even get the thing “on the launching pad”. and the difference today is that Reagan was viewed by the Dem Congress as a force to be recokened with while the mystery of Trump is wearing off.
I was reading the testimony before Ed Bolands committee the famous “I’ll eat my hat” if this thing cost 8 billion dollars.
and clearly Bolands comments were correct…they could not manage the program because the program itself became more important then what the program actually accomplishsed.
I dont know the answer to all of this actually, I dont know how somehow we get off the loop of one failed program after another. but I agree with every word you wrote 🙂
The reason that they won’t get the funding is simple. The Trump administration and the Republican controlled Senate will want the funds to come from so-called “social programs.” The Democrat controlled House, on the other hand, will insist that the country cannot afford the Republican tax cut nor the “Great Wall of the Rio Grande” and want any funds to come from a repeal of those “projects.” Neither side will budge and the Moon will have to wait for consensus.
Lets not pretend like alternatives to SLS/Orion would get anyone to the moon in 5 years. The “commercial” side of things has been contracting for a simple orbital manned capsule for a decade and is at least 5 years late and counting now by getting anything to fly. While Roscosmos keeps charging more for Soyuz seats.
Any discussions of “alternatives” would be far more credible if commercial crew had an actual track record to point to.
Let me point out that Commercial Crew ceased to be aimed at any “simple” capsule as soon as they were forced to allow the NASA HSF bureaucracy to insert itself into every detail of their processes.
Boeing is in the business of giving the NASA bureaucrats whatever they ask for, while charging them handsomely. I won’t speak to how things might have been different there.
But SpaceX, not so much. I think it’s safe to say that if SpaceX had been allowed to develop Dragon 2 in the same NASA-hands-off manner as Dragon 1, Dragon 2 would by now have flown multiple test flights, have undergone some number of interesting “anomalies”, had them corrected, and would by now be flying routine reliable passenger flights. At half or less the overall and per-flight cost of the actual massively bureaucratized and delayed program to date.
on that we dont agree if as you say SpaceX had been allowed to do D2 like it did D1…D2 would have killed a lot of people by now
Let me point out that NASA doesn’t actually stand for Need Another Seven Astronauts
I’ll do a twofer answer here, RGOler and savuporo…
RE “SpaceX would have killed people if allowed to do it their way! Therefore the intrusive-trad-NASA-way delays and cost multiplications are utterly justified”, that’s certainly the NASA establishment’s excuse for having inserted themselves into Dragon 2 systems and processes to a degree where SpaceX apparently wants nothing more to do with it in future.
But it ain’t necessarily so.
Reading comprehension time: “..would by now have flown multiple test flights, have undergone some number of interesting “anomalies”, had them corrected…” does not equal “mass carnage”. It equals a very different development approach than NASA’s perfect-the-first-flight-no-matter-how-much-it-costs-or-how-long-it-takes preference, yes. One that’s demonstrably faster and cheaper than NASA’s.
Less safe? Not proven – nor provable, on the data to date. A: “test flights” aren’t necessarily crewed, and B: every actual major anomaly SpaceX has encountered so far would arguably have killed nobody. (Two likely mitigated by capsule sep system, one a between-flights test with nobody on board – and jury still out on cause.)
On that score, well, savuporo is the one who helpfully reminds us that the last time NASA developed a crewed vehicle *their* way and ran it to *their* standards, “Need Another Seven Astronauts” became a grim joke. Twice. Out of only 134 total flights, a loss-of-crew rate of 1.5%.
But this time they’ll get it right? Sure. Me personally, I’d feel safer riding a capsule developed the SpaceX way than the NASA way. Because at this point they’ve been dinking with Dragon 2 to the point where they could well be introducing more problems than they’re eliminating. (See “diminishing returns”.) (EG, see recent NASA nervousness about the parachute that THEY insisted SpaceX adopt.)
I find it fascinating how good old contractor screw-ups become “NASA meddling” when things go south, and successes are are all to the contractors credit.
OK, you can set up a straw-man and beat it.
Now that we’ve established that, got any actual relevant points to make?
There is a fourth option. Just let Congress stonewall, then just buy seats to the Lunar Hilton when they are put on sale by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Of course Congress will have to let them buy the seats, otherwise it will be too embarrassing to see commercial astronauts and those from other nations, going to the Moon while NASA astronauts are stuck at the ISS.
We’re a couple months away a new fiscal year (Oct 1), and I don’t think all the relevant agency funding bills have been passed and signed into law. There’s a good chance this will lead to another year or more of sequestriation — which will keep the NASA budget right where it is now It’s going to be almost impossible to fund a 2024 Lunar landing program, in other words.
My expectation: the White House will find pleasure blasting Congressional Democrats for fouling up its attempts to Make America Great Again. Democrats will respond by blaming Donald Trump for trying to fund a Wall at the border and shortchanging various healthcare measures, without a single mention of NASA or the Artemis program,