"In its release, NASA said that during an Artemis flight test, teams discovered
battery issues and challenges with a component that controls air ventilation
and temperature control. Additionally, NASA has been investigating why char
layer pieces from its spacecraft's heat shield were lost during the Artemis I
mission."
No great surprise there. The Artemis program seems valuable and has
scientific merit but it also seems to be very badly affected by crony capitalism.
I'm guessing that there will be further delays and they might be significant.
Humans cannot know everything about how a particular system will respond
in an environment. Imperfect knowledge before hand means lots of testing
and delays.
Crony capitalism, uhm, not exactly.
The Space Launch System is obscenely expensive - at least
$2.5 billion per launch with some estimates at higher than $4 billion
per launch for a $/kg cost nearly 10x compared to other in-use launch
vehicles. At that rate they'll be able to do a maximum of one launch
per year. More likely it will be one launch every two years or even
more infrequent.
The whole program is designed around jobs-to-congressional-districts.
National prestige: it involves everyone in the nation in every congressional
district to impress other nations around the world the importance of the
United States. Through out history nations have sought to influence others,
not for the cost conscious.
One of the two in-development lunar landers is a modification of the
SpaceX Starship, as is part of the "Lunar Gateway". They may also use
Falcon Heavy to launch a lunar cargo version of the Dragon capsules to
supply the gateway.
Yeah, I griped about that earlier. Give me a government engineer any day.
Fortunately NASA didn't put all their eggs in once basket, maybe Blue Origin
will pull it off. Very risky promoting private industry in space.
The SLS costs about 10x per launch compared to each of the Starship's
two tests so far. Assuming that Starship can get it right within eight
more launches, their development cost will be the same as SLS. If they
get it right in less than eight launches, they may come in with development
costs lower than SLS.
Again from the wikipedia page,
SpaceX Starship Cost And Funding, I find
a different price entirely. NASA gave them 2.89 billion dollars for one
lander and another 1.15 billion for a second lander, so averaging I find
that Starship costs at least 2.02 billion a piece.
Now, that doesn't include the cost of the two stages, here I'll do a guess
based on:
Superheavy Launch Vehicle.
The first stage costs 154 million dollars and the second stage costs
92 million dollars for a total cost of 2.266 billion dollars per launch.
So out of the 5 billion SpaceX has spent on the Starship program that
leaves 468 million dollars for other things related.
NASA 2.50 billion a launch, SpaceX 2.25 a launch, about the same.
SpaceX is here to stay as a major player in the western world's space
programs for good reason.
I expect probably one more launch of Starship in May of 2024,
and will continue so long as he doesn't say, "We dug our own grave
with ..." Then it's a goner.