Official schedule just slipped to April 2023 for EM2. Like Constellation, it’s slipping more than a year per year. The program began in 2005. That would make it eighteen years.
Breakdown of Orion costs dating to 2005 ish: $5.8b under Constellation program, $4.5b since Constellation canceled, $6.77b through 2023.
— Stephen Clark (@StephenClark1) September 16, 2015
I weep when I contemplate the much more useful ways we could have spent that money. https://t.co/qaL2Tdqrhl
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) September 16, 2015
I never want to hear another NASA fanboy talk about SpaceX’s schedule slips ever again.
Lamar Smith of the House authorization committee is already blaming the slip on the Obama Administration’s underfunding of SLS/Orion. No doubt because of the wasteful corporate subsidies of Commercial Crew.
Lies are Truth, War is Peace…. it’s right up there with it.
Seventeen billion dollars to develop a capsule. There just aren’t words.
Why am I not surprised? We need a Sputnik moment to kick us in the fundament. Or nowadays you may want to call it a Shenzhou moment.
I can see better ways to spend the money. Obama spent $500 million building 5 bionic warriors to fight ISIS (link). That’s $100 million a pop, and using modern computer chips and power electronics instead of Steve Austin’s op-amps and trim pots (Austin’s upgrades would have cost $29 million in 2015 dollars), so they are certainly going to dominate the battlefield. For what NASA has spent on SLS we could field 170 of Obama’s super-soldiers and wipe ISIS off the map.
I wonder if both programs are being run out of the same department?
Ouch
I can’t get over the price tag. When you look at what they’re getting, you realize what the fixed costs must be to do *anything* at NASA. Rand, has GAO costed out a soup-to-nuts system including SLS, Orion, upper stage and lander/hab/anything (yes, sorta vague, but so are NASA’s plans…)? It’s got to be at least $30B, maybe nearer $50B.
Rand weep not. The money would not have been spent on space even if SLS never existed. So it was never available to begin with. At these figures does anyone seriously believe this pig will ever fly? No. Our real “space program” is being funded at the levels being spent on CCDev and ISS sustain. The rest is just a workfare entitlement. Might as well use off-the-books accounting.
Oh I forgot also the payments to Roscosmos… Those count as an essential part of our “space program”.
We can have a manned space industry, or we can have a hugely expensive and inefficient government jobs program.
One interesting thing that came out yesterday was that Gerstenmaier confirmed that they’re going to a different heat shield design than the one they flew in December. Meaning, of course, that they don’t have a tested design for EM-1. Does anyone here know what they’re likely to use to fill the gaps between the Avcoat blocks in the new design?
http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/09/16/orion-spacecraft-may-not-fly-with-astronauts-until-2023/
“Gerstenmaier gave high marks to engineers working on a redesign of Orion’s heat shield. Instead of installing the thermal shell on to the capsule in one monolithic piece, technicians will bolt on the Avcoat ablative heat shield in blocks for future flights.
“It is a lesson learned by engineers after it took ground crews longer than planned to fabricate and install the heat shield for the EFT-1 test flight last year…
“’We are making a heat shield change, but the engineering test article for that heat shield is already going to be complete by the end of this month, so that’s moving at a very good pace moving forward,’ Gerstenmaier said.”
And it probably still won’t be capable of coming back from Mars except under the most benign trajectories. But NASA has basically admitted that it’s a lunar-only system.
This is purest speculation, but the little that’s available on the new ~180-block Avcoat design sounds rather similar to the PICA candidate that lost out to the now-abandoned monolithic design back in 2009. So I wonder if a PICA upgrade at some point in the future might be a possibility. (Assuming Orion survives, that is.)
In short, Orion is over-engineered as a taxi for LEO or even cislunar exploration, but under-engineered for anything else – certainly for Mars.
This is what happens when you build your architecture before you’ve even defined a mission for it. Unless that mission is keeping jobs in certain space states.
Bah. Orion was cancelled in 1963. This pork-barrel programme doesn’t deserve the name.