Alabama lawmaker just wants NASA to pilot SLS, don’t care about payloads

The U.S. House Appropriations Committee passed a budget bill for NASA on Thursday, and it’s generally good enough for the space agency. The legislation provides for $ 25.04 billion and funds most of NASA’s top spaceflight priorities, including the Artemis Moon program.

Notably, the bill allocates $ 1.345 billion for a human landing system under the Artemis program. And while some members of the House complained during this week’s hearings about NASA’s April decision to select SpaceX as the sole supplier of the first demonstration landing, the legislation does not prevent NASA from moving forward. ‘before with the contract.

As part of its plan to return humans to the moon, NASA has sought to balance its reliance on traditional space entrepreneurs such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, generally favored by members of Congress due to their largesse in political donations and their willingness to spread jobs across many districts – and new space companies like SpaceX that are offering more bang for their buck while playing less well with elected officials.

A major implication of NASA’s $ 2.89 billion award to SpaceX in April for the human landing system is that the contract provided significant funding for the Starship rocket and its Super Heavy booster. This advanced launch system will directly compete with NASA’s Space Launch System, which is built by traditional space contractors and provides thousands of jobs in all 50 states. If Starship is working, which increasingly seems likely, it will launch more payload than the SLS booster, for a lot less money, while still being reusable. In short, it should be superior to NASA’s SLS rocket in every way imaginable except politically.

So the fact that the House of the United States has agreed to provide NASA with funding that supports Starship – SpaceX’s lunar lander is based on a modified Starship vehicle – is significant. But that doesn’t mean some members of Congress haven’t tried to bolster the SLS program, which is based at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

Find missions for SLS

One of the strongest supporters of the SLS rocket, U.S. Representative Robert Aderholt, R-Alabama, proposed a credit law amendment that altered NASA’s Human Landing System program and supported upgrades to the SLS rocket. Eventually the amendment was withdrawn, but it illustrates how far committed politicians like Aderholt are willing to go to save the SLS rocket from obsolescence.

Aderholt’s amendment provided that NASA would select a “second” human landing system supplier in the next fiscal year, which would necessarily be a team led by Blue Origin or Dynetics. This is not controversial, as NASA itself would like to add a second supplier and plans to do so with a follow-up contract for future missions. However, the Aderholt Amendment went on to make several specific requests:

• Forces this non-SpaceX lander to fly on the SLS rocket block 1B, an upgraded version with more carrying capacity
• Orders that the launch of SLS Block 1B not be part of the “price” of the demonstration mission of this second HLS supplier, so that NASA must provide the rocket “for free”
• Orders NASA to invest in the ability to build more SLS rockets to support a higher launch rate (without providing funding)
• At some point in the future, but no later than 2032, NASA must have a plan to perform at least one SLS Block 1B cargo flight per year. “The mission for which is to be determined by the administrator of NASA.”

The amendment proposes a two-pronged strategy. The first is to justify spending billions of dollars to upgrade the rocket from its initial configuration, Block 1, to a larger, more efficient rocket. This “Block 1B” version includes a new second stage, the Exploration Upper Stage, which will be developed by Boeing over the next five years or so. This clearly appeals to Boeing, which is behind the Aderholt Amendment, as well as lawmakers in Alabama who would love nothing more than to host a second decade of SLS rocket development.

Second, this amendment would seek to find missions for this improved rocket, which would have a launch cost of around $ 2 billion per flight. (The unit cost of the exploration upper stage alone is expected to exceed $ 800 million.) To that end, Aderholt sought to require the second lunar lander to fly on a Block 1B SLS rocket launch.

It’s pretty wild for several reasons. For one thing, all HLS bidders were told they could choose which rockets they preferred to launch in 2019. At the time, NASA and Boeing had actually offered a “commercial” version of the SLS for landers. lunar. None of the top three bidders (SpaceX, Blue Origin or Dynetics) chose the SLS rocket, of course. It was too expensive and there was no guarantee that NASA or Boeing could build them at a sufficiently high rate.

In addition to making lunar lander flights mandatory, Aderholt’s provision states that NASA must have a plan for an SLS cargo launch once a year by 2032. Imagine how this provision, if it had been passed. , would have crippled NASA. Congress basically tells the agency, “Over a decade from now you will have to use this super expensive rocket every year, whether you need it or not.” And to make sure of that, we put it in law.

How does NASA know that it will have to launch one mission per year on a cargo version of the SLS rocket in 11 years? He can’t, of course.