Electoral politics meets rocket test flights!

Two years ago, NASA launched it’s Lockheed-Martin built Orion spacecraft in an uncrewed test flight around the Moon and back to Earth on the mission named Artemis I launched on the first SLS rocket flight. SLS’s prime contractor is Boeing. SLS was designed to re-use as much Space Shuttle technology as possible so that the defence contractors involved could pad their profit margins and not have to spend much on R&D of new technology.

The Orion heat shield uses an Apollo-era technology called AVCOAT. NASA thought it was a safe choice because it worked fine for all the Apollo missions despite a newer, better material called PICA being available. PICA has been used for almost 20 years on some of the most demanding missions with the highest re-entry speeds. Basically if you want to get back to Earth safely and you have your choice of heat shield material, you want a variant of PICA. It’s as safe and proven as space technology can get.

Well, it turns out that the AVCOAT heat shield didn’t burn away evenly and cleanly like on Apollo, because while the chemistry is the same, they applied it in a different way. The first test flight’s capsule had great big chunks missing from the heat shield. That Orion capsule did splash down intact out of pure dumb luck, but those missing chunks sparked an independent review because they are a potential crew-killer. Missing chunks out of a heat shield killed the space shuttle Columbia’s crew.

So here’s where the politics comes in!

NASA has announced that they know what the problem is, but they’re not going to announce what the problem is before the end of the year. And the person who made that decision is Administrator Bill Nelson, a career politician and loyal lifelong ally to Joe Biden.

Orion is an overweight pig of a ship, deliberately so. Right now the only production rocket can that lift it around the moon is Boeing’s massively expensive SLS. SLS works but it’s ridiculously expensive at an estimated $4 billion per flight. NASA claims less, but independent government audits put it at about $4 billion factoring in all ground support costs and averaging the R&D costs on top of direct hardware costs. There’s about an 18-month production time per rocket minimum. And SLS only exists to lift Orion. Cancel one and you cancel the other. They were designed in lockstep with each other so that the US senate could spend as much as possible on local subcontractors for personal political gain.

Artemis II is to be the first crewed Artemis flight, doing orbits around the Moon and testing systems and procedures before coming back, like Apollo 8. Artemis III is to be the first crewed landing using a variant of SpaceX’s Starship called HLS. Artemis III’s HLS landing vehicle is to launch uncrewed, with an Orion capsule acting as the taxi to get astronauts to it and as their return vehicle to come back to Earth. Artemis II’s hardware is nearly ready to fly, including that AVCOAT heat shield. But the heat shield debacle has put it all on hold.

Even though NASA knows the fix, they’ll have to test that fix. Which means another test flight of SLS. Which means building another SLS rocket, and building another Orion capsule. That could put the additional test flight cost over $5 billion minimum. Plus years of delays for the first crewed mission as they need to build another rocket and capsule. So the scuttlebutt is that Bill Nelson, as a personal favour to Biden, is deliberately withholding the expensive bad news from public release until after the election.

More fun facts! The Orion program has cost, in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars, about $30 billion without a single successful test flight, let alone any crew flights. And SLS has cost about $26 billion with a single successful test flight. And this is all because the US senate, who keep an iron grip on NASA pursestrings, wanted both programs to be as expensive as possible so that they’re as profitable as possible for their defence contractor friends.