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NASA admits it can't afford the SLS rocket program when Artemis's moon landing is blocked.

Shulou Source: shulou.com Published: 2023-11-24 20:33:59 10月01日 Update

CTOnews.com, September 9 (Xinhua)-- the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on Thursday, severely criticizing NASA for its lack of transparency in promoting the SLS program, which has exceeded its budget by $6 billion (currently about 44.1 billion yuan).

The SLS rocket launched the Artemis 1 mission on November 16, 2022, sending an unmanned Orion spacecraft into space.

The 5.75 million-pound rocket is crucial to NASA's lunar program, which is scheduled to launch the Artemis 2 mission at the end of 2024, followed by the first manned landing on the lunar surface as early as 2025, with another tentatively scheduled for 2028.

CTOnews.com previously reported that the planned cost of SLS rocket engines and boosters, which cost $7 billion (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 49.49 billion yuan), has risen to $13.1 billion (currently about 92.617 billion yuan), and that figure is expected to rise further. In addition, the implementation schedule of the SLS rocket has also been extended from 14 years to 25 years.

NASA officials finally admitted that the budget was out of control and that the project was unsustainable and unaffordable.

The GAO report says:

NASA does not intend to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of its most powerful rocket, the SLS.

After the first launch of the SLS, NASA plans to spend billions of dollars, requiring Aerojet Rocketdyne to make a variety of SLS components, including core-grade, RS-25 engines and so on.

Each rocket launch requires four engines and two boosters, and a RS-25 engine currently costs about $100 million (currently about 735 million yuan).

NASA officials who spoke to GAO acknowledged that the SLS program was unaffordable and unsustainable at current cost levels, exceeding the availability of Artemis tasks expected by NASA officials.