The US should rethink NASA’s Artemis lunar program – it’s only wasteful

The founder and majority owner of the Bloomberg media holding, Michael Bloomberg, wrote an article in which he literally destroyed NASA’s activities within the Artemis lunar program. In his opinion, which he confirmed with some figures and facts, this program will lead to nothing except fabulous waste of the federal budget. The future President of the United States should immediately reconsider plans to return the United States to the Moon once the election is completed.

Boeing has built the first stage for the SLS rocket that will send humans to the Moon for the first time in 50 years. Image source: Boeing

In recent years, each time the next audit of NASA’s activities and the planning of the agency’s new annual budget, unpleasant figures appeared about overexpenditures and lags behind the schedule of the Artemis program. Spending figures have doubled, tripled and multiplied, and the time frame has shifted by five years or more. At NASA, all the problems are explained by the novelty of the solutions and the technical difficulties caused by this, as well as a formal ban on entering into contracts with contractors specifying a fixed amount. This may encourage private companies to charge much higher “just in case” prices than would be the case with a floating fee contract.

In response, Michael Bloomberg notes: “Nearly $100 billion has been spent so far and nothing has budged, but the program’s complexity and outrageous waste continue to grow. The next US president should rethink this program as a whole.”

According to the author, the problem is that this mission is not scientific, but political in nature. The task of collecting rocks on the Moon can easily be entrusted to robots. You don’t need a person for this. A human mission inflates the budget to astronomical levels while providing almost nothing in return. One lunar spacesuit costs $1 billion, and they have yet to be manufactured and purchased.

It should be noted that the author is only partly right in his indignation. Space is not yet about direct benefits. Space programs are a technological locomotive for a country that is willing to spend resources on it. And the more complex the project, the more technologies have to be developed for it, but then these technologies will work for the economy.

Michael Bloomberg is generally not against science and progress, as he notes in the note. You just have to count the money. NASA’s inspector general estimates that the Artemis program has spent $23.8 billion so far. Each launch will likely cost at least $4 billion, four times more than initial estimates. This is many times higher than the costs of the private sector. However, the SLS rocket can only be launched approximately once every two years and, unlike SpaceX rockets, cannot be reused.

Moreover, the SLS rocket in its current configuration is unable to deliver a crewed Orion spacecraft and a lunar lander into lunar orbit at the same time. They will have to be delivered into orbit separately. At the same time, Orion has problems with the heat shield and, perhaps, not only with it. The task won’t get much easier when NASA places the Gateway lunar station into lunar orbit as a staging post before landing humans on the Moon. Annual maintenance of the station will consume at least $1 billion, and the need for it is quite doubtful.

Problems may arise even with the launch of the Gateway station into lunar orbit. This will have to be done by the “reinforced” upper stage of SLS Block 1B. The creation of the enhanced stage has already dragged on for six years and has risen in price to $5.7 billion. And this is not to mention the fact that its production is carried out by the honored “screw-maker” of the last decade, Boeing. By the way, things are no better with the production of the ML-2 mobile launch complex for launching the “enhanced” SLS rocket. The complex has risen in price almost 8 times since the contract was signed (up to $2.7 billion), and no one will say exactly when it will be completed.

In order to support the Artemis program, the agency is canceling project after project in an attempt to raise funds for the lunar program. The ultimate irony may be, says the author of a devastating editorial in a leading American publication for financiers, that Elon Musk, on his relatively inexpensive and reusable Starship, can get to the Moon before NASA without Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2.