Reply to post: Re: Very exciting!

NASA circles August in its diary to put Artemis I capsule in Moon orbit

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Very exciting!

I think we are looking for different lights.

A single SLS is $2.2B - ignoring R&D costs. Add in $568M for the ground systems, $1B for Orion and $300M for the service module and you get to $4B per launch. Maximum cadence is at best 1/year and the wheels fall off that after three launches (Artemis IV requires a new upper stage and a badly over budget and delayed mobile launch structure).

For comparison a Crew Dragon on a Falcon Heavy could do SLS's job for $250M with multiple launches per year. A crew Starship would be <$100M and many launches per year.

SLS is slurping up budget that could be spent on space suits, a Luna rover or a moon base while at the same time restricting Artemis to one launch per year. That will strangle any hope of a sustainable presence on the Moon. At the current rate of progress NASA astronauts will eventually get to the Moon and will be able to look at the window where they will see Jared Isaacman offering to let them borrow a space suit.

The only way Americans get a sustainable presence on the Moon is if they write to the politicians and ask for a Moon program instead of this SLS "jobs" program. The light I am looking for at the end of this tunnel is the proper cancellation of SLS, and not a re-naming as happened with Constellation/Ares.

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