Shuttle Costs Per Month
Mar 9th, 2010 by Kirk Sorensen
“Program manager John Shannon said Tuesday it costs $200 million a month to keep the fleet flying.”
This is why President Bush and Sean O’Keefe knew that we would have to bring the shuttle program to an end in order to have any hope of going forward with NASA’s use of space. Michael Griffin knew it. President Obama and General Bolden know this too.
Source: Money key to more space shuttle flights
Continuing on this vein, an article today in The Space Review: “Costs of US piloted programs”
“each day spent onboard by an ISS crewmember costs about $7.5 million (compared to $5.5 million for Skylab.)”
The shuttle program is $3 billion a year. The ISS program is $2 billion a year. And the Constellation program was $3.4 billion last year. So $2.4 billion is not a lot to continue the space shuttle program. That still leaves you with plenty of money to develop a shuttle derived heavy lift vehicle and an HL-20 type of space plane.
Of course, if Obama had raised the budget by $3 billion, as recommended by the Augustine Commission, we’d have a lot more.
But $2.4 billion wouldn’t even pay for a week occupying Iraq, if you want to talk about funding useless adventures.
Marcel, are you an American? Cause I’m not and even I understand that Obama has no say, at all, over how much money NASA gets. Obama can’t “raise the budget by $3 billion”. He can *recommend* that the Congress appropriations committees raise the budget by $3B but they have declined to do that for the last 30 years, so why would they do it now? Just because Obama is such a great guy?
The reality is that the slight increase that Obama has requested to the NASA budget will not be agreed upon by the appropriations committees. So please, leave your stupid partisan arguments out.
The reason ISS, Shuttle, Constellation, etc. cost so much is because they have such a large (and very well-paid) workforce behind them. If we can figure out how to have astronauts operate much more autonomously when in space (and not have to train in really expensive ways for a long time for every task), then costs can come down.
Sorry Trent, but I don’t know where you got the idea that Congress hasn’t raised the NASA budget in 30 years. They have! Although sometimes they have lowered it. But there’s currently strong bipartisan support for NASA in the Congress. Its the lack of leadership in the White House over the past 40 years and now that’s the problem.
And if President Obama was really a great guy, and a smart one, he’d be committing us to establish a permanent base on the Moon before the end of the decade.
Marcel,
1. The budget has never been raised $3B/year to support a single program.. except Apollo.
2. Your “by the end of the decade” comment suggests to me that you’re a member of the Apollo Cargo Cult.
This isn’t the 1960s anymore.. GET OVER IT.
Marcel,
There’s strong bipartisan support for a bigger NASA budget–among the 3 or 4 states that would get most of the benefit from such a move. For the rest of Congress there’s strong bipartisan neglect. They generally go along with the status quo funding-wise, but in spite of all this “Bipartisan support”, almost every effort in the past 10 years to get a big topline increase for NASA (the Mikulski Miracles and such) have failed badly. I think you’re imagining Congress the way you wish it was, not the way it is.
~Jon
“$2.4 billion wouldn’t pay for a week occupying Iraq.”
Are you going to complain about the cost of Vietnam, as well? War is expensive. We went to war. Whether it was ill-advised or we have faulty memories about our reasons for going there, Iraq has already happened. It is a sunk cost.
Likewise, the money spent on NASA programs, previously, is sunk costs. The only question is what is prudent and economical going forward (balanced between long-term and short-term concerns, with more emphasis on the short-term because of deficits). Is it cheaper, compared to derived benefits, from here, to continue Constellation, or continue servicing the shuttle, or to move in the new direction the Administration has proposed?
This new budget is designed to allow NASA to get more bang for its buck. State and municipal governments around the country are going bankrupt, and the federal government is running enormous deficits. Whatever your political flavor, it is clear that our current path is not sustainable, and moves toward sustainability among even “small” departments like NASA are welcome.
@Jonathan Goff
The four largest recipients of NASA funds (Texas, California, Florida, and Maryland) are some pretty darn important states. And if those states, which represent about 30% of the US economy, don’t recover from this recession then the United States won’t recover from this recession. But if you think our investment in space has only benefited three or four states then you need to turn off the television broadcast that you’re receiving from– space– and really think about what you’re saying.
Marcel,
Maryland, Virginia, and California do better under the new plan than the current plan. Ohio is probably a wash. Texas and Florida *might* do a little worse under Obama’s proposal, but not significantly worse than under the PoR. It’s only Alabama and Utah that really hurt, and they’re both very safe Red states, so I wonder how much pull they actually have with Obama.
Also, I wasn’t talking Space as a whole, but NASA HSF. Current NASA HSF has very little to do with the space products most Americans use. And he isn’t getting rid of NASA HSF, but focusing it on development work that’s more likely to result in benefits to the average American than building SD HLVs.
~Jon
Although we only spend less than a third of a cent per tax dollar on manned space flight, our investment in human spaceflight has the largest long term benefits to humanity. Despite the fact that the US spends about a trillion dollars a year protecting us from enemies abroad, the human species could still be completely wiped out by the radiation and nuclear winter caused by a thermonuclear war. A large extraterrestrial impact could also wipe us out. And some disease released from a military lab could also wipe out humanity.
So investing in human spaceflight in order to expand human civilization beyond the Earth greatly enhances the survival of our species. And if we can also exploit the natural resources of the solar system in order to enhance our survival in the rest of the solar system then this too will have a tremendous impact on our economic growth.
Its estimated that if the total mineral wealth of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter were equally distributed amongst every human on Earth, each individual’s share would come out to be more than 100 billion dollars. Of course if we greedy Americans and our advanced space technology had a monopoly on those resources then every US citizen’s share would come out to be over two trillion dollars each. But to be honest, I’d be satisfied with just 0.1% of my share:-)
Marcel,
What does survival of the species have to do with the recession? And what part of wasting resources (i.e. using more than you produce) will help real economic activity increase? It’s hard to follow an argument that jumps from make-work for some people in three or four states (Shuttle, Ares) to surviving what would otherwise kill us all.
Yes, the amount of money spent on military is too much. Also, Americans spend a lot of money on video games. Both of these facts are red herrings, distractions from the question of how best to use the fixed resources allotted to NASA, and whether the new allotment achieves better results compared to the old allotment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSChW9HxAvI
The problem is that to get more funding, NASA has to spread money out to more congressional districts, but spreading things out makes them more expensive, so its a vicious cycle whose goal really is about jobs and spending taxpayer money and not about putting people and vehicles in orbit.
Worse, congress doesnt even let the administrator close redundant or unneeded facilities to save money.
Personally I’d rather see a trimmed down manned program purely funded by payload fees and a global Astro-Powerball lottery that could be played over the internet, prizes being tourist rides to orbit. Powerball serves 40 states and has annual revenues over $2 billion. A global lottery should be able to generate $3 billion easily.
Then NASA can tell congress to shove it, and close unneeded facilities, lay off unneeded staff as they wish.
I’d also put some money into improving the silica tile technology so they can double the size of the average tile without cracking. This will reduce maintenance costs on the Shuttle TPS by 3/4 (TPS maint itself is 3/4 of all maint man hours between flights) and allow a quadrupling of the sortie rate without compromising safety.
Shut down and retirement of the STS Shuttle Fleet came out of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report in late 2003. President Bush made it Policy in January of 2004.
Long lead items procurement was programed with this guidance for the Shuttle to stop flying in 2010 after the ISS was assembled to the directed level by Congress and etc.
The ablity to restart the long lead procurement process for the Shuttle is long past. To do it now would cost Billions of $’s and years of time before NASA saw any hardware show up at the Cape for use.
But hey, if the Congress-critters want to paper over their negligence of keeping up with what’s going on in NASA and the Space Industries instead of building new ones that function….