Artemis I Missions Costing Billions of Dollars Each

NASA’s Artemis I missions, the first of which was postponed on Monday, will cost billions of dollars, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin told lawmakers earlier this year.

The launch director postponed the Artemis I rocket launch on Monday after crews worked to troubleshoot an engine leak, ultimately forcing them to miss the two-hour launch window at the Kennedy Space Center:

“The launch director halted today’s Artemis I launch attempt at approximately 8:34 a.m. EDT. The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft remain in a safe and stable configuration,” a NASA blog update read.”Launch controllers were continuing to evaluate why a bleed test to get the RS-25 engines on the bottom of the core stage to the proper temperature range for liftoff was not successful, and ran out of time in the two-hour launch window. Engineers are continuing to gather additional data,” it added.

The unmanned vehicle was set to mark NASA’s delve back into moon exploration, but this particular launch was not even set to land on the moon but orbit it for over a month.

“We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a career politician, said following the postponement. “And, in fact, they’ve got a problem with the gases going on the engine bleed on one engine. You can’t go–there are certain guidelines.”

“And I think it’s just illustrative that this is a very complicated machine, a very complicated system. And all those things have to work and you don’t want to light the candle until it’s ready to go,” he continued, adding that it is “just part of the space business.”

“And it’s part of particularly a test flight. We are stressing and testing this rocket in the spacecraft in a way that you would never do it with the human crew on board. That’s the purpose of a test flight,” he claimed:

These projects come with a hefty price tag, as NASA Inspector General Paul Martin told lawmakers earlier this year, as each of the first four missions are expected to cost $4.1 billion, and they are not even expected to get astronauts to the moon until 2025 or later.

According to press release from Democrat Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), the “projected the agency will spend $53 billion on Artemis from FY 2021-2025” — a price tag Martin identified as “unsustainable”:

Martin’s testimony to the space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee recapped a November 2021 report from his office on NASA’s management of the Artemis program. It concluded that production and operations costs for Artemis I through Artemis IV will be $4.1 billion each.

That’s a “price tag that strikes us as unsustainable,” he said today.

That does not include development costs. His office projects the total cost for Artemis from FY2012, when the Space Launch System (SLS) program began, through FY2025 will be $93 billion. Of that, $53 billion is for FY2021-2025.

The next possible dates for the Artemis I launch are Friday, September 2 and Monday, September 5.

Artemis I Missions Estimated to Cost $4.1 Billion Each: ‘That Strikes Us as Unsustainable’

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