For many years, readers have asked me a simple question:

“Casey, why do you hate the SLS so much? Don’t you also hate Orion?”

Yes, yes I do. But life is finite and my heart is mostly filled with love, and so I held off in the hope that either someone else would step forth and deliver a blistering tirade, or perhaps Orion would finally succumb to the magnitude of its contradictions and die a mostly peaceful death, unlike the astronauts who are fated to roll the dice in this thing this year. I mean next year. Well, at any rate probably before they die of natural causes in old age.

Here is a brief summary of previous posts on the SLS+Orion program. Prior to this point I’ve reserved most of my critique for SLS. And for new readers of this blog, you’ll find that 98% of my writing is technical, positive, and I hope interesting. But someone has to write a pointed critique every now and then.

February 24, 2021, during the opening days of the Biden administration, I wrote “SLS: Is cancellation too good?” (No, no it’s not). This post made quite a splash. Numerous insiders reached out to confirm and elaborate parts of the story. The ongoing failure of the program is hard to disguise, after all. I have it on good authority that the post was read by NASA center directors and within the White House, but I will not be more specific on this front.

October 2, 2024, SLS had still not been canceled so I wrote an update, elaborating on the intervening four years of failure and waste and editorializing on the contagion afflicting NASA’s technical integrity (a problem that Orion also contributes to) as a result of the futility of the program. “SLS is still a national disgrace”. My blog’s readership having swelled considerably in the intervening years, this post also did the rounds.

January 17, 2025, during the last days of the Biden administration, I wrote a post on organizational failure modes that afflict high conscientiousness organizations, and christened it Dittemore’s Law after the Shuttle flight director whose fateful call sealed the fate of the seven astronauts who perished in the Columbia disaster.

By June 12, 2025, with Jared Isaacman’s nomination to NASA director stalled and China’s lunar program accelerating towards a human landing in late 2029 (just 1400 days away at the time of writing) I wrote “NASA is worth saving” to present the affirmative case on the fate of NASA, even as many previous champions seemed to have lost either faith or hope. The venerable organization, founded in 1958 to uphold the mantle of Freedom in the space domain and demonstrate the superiority of American technology over Soviet, is literally crumbling before our eyes. A series of acute stressors under the Trump administration is revealing the depth of chronic issues that have festered for decades. I am far from certain that NASA can regain anything like the vigor necessary to respond decisively to the Chinese threat, but I am determined that the free people of Earth not live under a Red Moon for the rest of eternity.

Finally, the usual caveats apply. I used to work for NASA. I was treated decently enough. I represent only my own opinions as of today. My purpose here is to entertain, inform, and motivate. Lockheed isn’t Boeing but even so, I am not and have never been suicidal, I have 3 (soon to be 4!) children, and I intend to live a long and productive life. I provide no warranty that my calculations can be relied on for the safe navigation of human-occupied space craft in deep space, but in general I’m pretty good at math. As you will see, this post is generally not a personal critique of individuals who may have spent a good part of their entire career working on this, though in my experience very few people who are working on it actually believe the program and mission is as good as the paycheck they cash every two weeks.

Some disambiguation and a bit of history.

By Orion, I am referring to the Orion Capsule currently being developed by Lockheed Martin for the Artemis Program. It has been in development since 2006, originally begun under the Presidency of George W Bush as the Crew Exploration Vehicle for the Constellation program. Literally my entire adult life. Duke Nukem Forever took only 14 years. You can make a whole new fully qualified engineer from conception to graduation in less time. One of my challenges in writing this piece is that the program is so old a lot of the primary sources are now affected by link rot, and I’ve had to resort to using Internet Archive snapshots!

Orion can also refer to a nuclear bomb powered spacecraft proposed by Freeman Dyson, and an orbital debris sweeping space laser. While neither of these projects has ever been built or operated, neither has also consumed more than $30b.

Speaking of which, this is as good a place as any to dive in.

Orion is absurdly expensive to build and operate

According to Wikipedia, the Orion program has already burned through over $30b.

For your reference, by expense alone, SpaceX would have shipped Crew Dragon by 2008, before Obama was elected. Going by schedule, even Boeing’s irredeemably broken Starliner capsule would have flown by 2018.

This chart shows (inflation adjusted) budget and schedule for six US capsules, along with uncrewed and crewed flight timing. It’s pretty clear which of the modern capsules has achieved product market fit.

Crew Dragon’s first flight was in 2020. Artemis II will attempt to repeat the Apollo 8 mission of 1968 – a flight around the Moon and splash down on Earth. But if all we want to do is fly around the Moon and back, a lightly modified Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy could have done this at any point since 2020. We could do it today, or tomorrow. It wouldn’t mean very much in the context of the ongoing Chinese land rush, but it could be executed for well under $500m if SpaceX was cooperative – roughly equivalent to a single month of burn on the SLS and Orion programs. That is, for the same budget, we could fly a crew around the Moon every month indefinitely. In fact, according to the NASA OIG, Orion’s additional marginal cost for launch is $1b. I’m not even sure how you could find $1b worth of things to do and spend on a relatively small capsule. What’s it made of, pure gold? The Navy, for example, even in its modern and bloated state, can manage to build most of a fast attack nuclear submarine for just the marginal launch cost of the Orion capsule!

A Dragon+Falcon Heavy stunt is probably superfluous, as SpaceX is focused on the Human Landing System (HLS) via Starship. In addition to Falcon Heavy, Vulcan or New Glenn would also be capable of a similar mission. In other words, Artemis I was a decade plus overdue unmanned test of an obsolete capsule that still managed to cost over $5b and generated enough adverse data that it’s going to take four years to even get to the next $5b test flight. For that time and money, any number of hungry new space companies or even foreign space programs could develop an entirely new capsule and rocket from scratch.

To recap, Orion, which has flown in flight configuration (except for large parts of the life support system, which will be tested for the first time on the Artemis II mission with four astronauts in deep space for a week) exactly one time (2022) has taken four times longer and cost six times more to develop than Crew Dragon. This is not a directly fair comparison, since Crew Dragon is already a seasoned operational vehicle with a functional heatshield that is delivered well within mass margins, but we do our best.

The irony of Orion’s decades of profligacy is that recently the news has been full of (Acting NASA Administrator) Secretary Duffy’s complaints that the Human Landing System (HLS) program has been progressing too slowly. Unlike SLS and Orion, which might one day manage to repeat a mission we first flew almost sixty years ago and which commercial providers could do for 1% of the cost this year, the HLS program is doing the hard part (actually landing on the Moon and then flying back) with less than $3b and has been in active development only since 2021.

This concept seems difficult for some to grasp so I prepared the following infographic to make the situation clearer.

This one might help too.

Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b to date. If I took $100b in $20 bills and stapled them end to end, they would run from my office, down the hall, out the front door, down the drive, onto the road, onto the ramp, down the local freeway, past the crumbling remnants of JPL, up the mountain, then up into the sky, through the troposphere, past the space station, between 10,000 Starlink satellites, past geostationary orbit (my string of bills is now longer than a space elevator!), all the way to the Moon, around the entire lunar equator, between all the legs of all the lunar landers of all the missions that have landed there, then all the way back to the Earth, through the atmosphere, down the mountain, down the road, through my front door, and back to my desk. At the present rate of NASA’s budget, additional bill consumption, stapling, and ejection from my office desk would break the speed of sound.

The Orion capsule is far too heavy to be useful

One of the reasons the Augustine Committee advocated for the cancellation of Orion in the first place way back in 2009 is that it had become obvious that success, even then, was not in the set of possible outcomes. One of the reasons for this was that the Ares V, the spiritual predecessor of the current SLS, lacked the power necessary to launch the specified capsule mass plus the Altair lunar lander to the Moon.

It’s actually more complicated than this because Orion was originally meant to fly on Ares I, a rocket that combined all the scariest components of Shuttle and which flew just one time, unsuccessfully, before someone realized that a launch abort would be impossible without the SRB debris shredding the parachutes. Seriously team, don’t use solid fuel with human cargo.

The moment when Ares I-X smashed the upper stage during staging, which was approximately the sixth worst thing about this rocket, which also damaged the launch tower, subjected the crew capsule to shocking levels of vibration, and carried a launch escape system despite the fact that, like SLS, the most likely launch failure mode involves filling the sky with supersonic chunks of burning ammonium perchlorate.

NASA awarded Lockheed Martin what became the Orion contract on August 31, 2006. By early 2007, excessive growth in weight had already been flagged as a problem. According to NASA whistleblower Joshua Foxworth, Lockheed was unable to internally provide any mathematical basis for the weights and balances used in its Orion Preliminary Design Review in late 2008.

Constant changes to weights continued to occur throughout the duration of the program, resulting in a total capsule launch weight (including launch escape system) of over 33 T, almost as much as a 737 airliner. By comparison, the launch (wet) mass of the Crew Dragon capsule is just 12.5 T, while the Apollo command/service module weighed almost 29 T, of which a large fraction was fuel and other expendables to sustain and transport the spacecraft to and from the Moon.

That seems almost impossible, but here’s the mass breakdown from Wikipedia. Just the launch abort system weighs 7 T, as much as the entire Soyuz module.

Back in about 2009, NASA unironically sought to address uncontrolled mass budget growth for Orion by constricting its requirements on astronaut height and weight. If we’re in the business of running a Berlin Airlift to the Moon, I don’t think astronaut weight is going to be material to the enterprise.

Originally, the Constellation version of Orion was to ship with a powerful service module with delta V (1500-1800 m/s) comparable to the Apollo spacecraft (2800 m/s), but this died in the cancellation of Constellation. It was replaced with the European Service Module, a glorified satellite bus with barely enough delta V (1450 m/s) to perform a LEO de-orbit burn, and nowhere near enough to get into, and out of, low Lunar orbit.

In this case, the hilariously underpowered ESM is not an artifact of European hair shirt environmentalism but a preposterously restricted mass budget resulting from SLS underperformance and Orion bloat. You might be forgiven for thinking that because SLS is big like the Saturn V, there is also room somewhere in the fairing for a lunar lander, like in Apollo, but you’d be wrong. The mass budget on SLS for a lunar lander is 0 kg. I’ve trawled through the (public) archives in search of internal NASA documentation raising the flag that deleting the lunar lander on a lunar landing rocket might be an oversight, but have thus far found nothing. If you have a document, I’d be keen to review it. With a launch rate of one per two years, it’s not like another SLS could launch a different lunar lander.

From an anthropological point of view the SLS and Orion are a fascinating set of artifacts, living embodiments of a mentality that supposes that a lunar landing would be possible if only the Moon were a little bit closer and had zero surface gravity. If only.

This isn’t a place for a math lesson, but I really cannot overemphasize that things that fly have to restrict their mass in an almost vicious manner, and this is doubly true for things that fly in space. For $3b per year, NASA’s contractors could not employ fewer than 26520 people, enough that we could have one whole engineer per kilogram of the entire 26520 kg system. On marginal launch cost alone, we’re paying $200,000/kg, enough to justify spending an entire annual salary to eliminate something that weighs less than the largest cup of coffee Starbucks will sell you.

The Congressional pork memes almost write themselves.

(Okay, he is cute though.)

Enough talking around this subject. Design choices have consequences. Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth. That is, NASA spent $31b on a capsule and $60b on a Moon rocket that is so overweight it can’t even reach the Moon, a fact that has been undeniable since 2009.

Whoops, I guess?

Wrong Mission

This is as good a place as any to dispose of the notion that it’s not NASA or Lockheed’s fault that their Moon rocket can’t actually reach the Moon, even though everyone involved has known this since the very beginning. “Congress forced this design on us.” I hear it every damn day. Congresspeople are not rocket scientists. They have a lot of things to do. They routinely pass laws calling for NASA to do things that are more or less impossible. Who is going to tell them? Me or the NASA Administrator? Give me a break! “Congress forced us” is a weak excuse at the best of times, but when we’re looking for someone to blame for losing badly to China, anyone who said this will be a good start. The failure of SLS is a team effort, and it lays bare NASA’s ever-weakening claim to any form of technical integrity. Well done, everyone!

NASA has been unable to completely avoid the fact that their Moon rocket and Orion capsule can’t actually reach the Moon, so to paper over this inconvenient truth they’ve attempted to sell us on a Lunar Gateway. This plan is so brilliant I wish I had thought of it. It goes something like this.

The Moon rocket can’t reach the Moon? No problem. We’ll put a space station half way, call it a Gateway or a Stepping Stone or a Trip Wire or some other cliche, and then we’ll build another entirely different rocket system with a bunch of money Congress will never give us to go the rest of the way, orbital mechanics be damned. Congress loves space stations though. Never mind that the Chinese don’t have to deal with this nonsense.

Of course, there was never any internal plan to finish the job. Here’s 434 pages of NASA talking around the subject last year without getting anywhere. At the 11th hour, the commercial (and moderately successful) part of human spaceflight got the HLS contract over the line, but with that came an implicit assumption. If a contractor was capable of delivering an entire human landing system to Gateway, and from there to the Moon, and then back to Gateway, and then back to Earth, then the contractor’s system could bypass Gateway completely, transporting humans from LEO to the Moon and back. SpaceX has all but explicitly stated their preference to delete the Gateway speedbump from their architecture, and in the current situation NASA is in no position to dictate terms.

The only piece missing would be a heat-shielded capsule, such as Dragon, that could transport the human crew back to the Earth from Lunar return trajectories. As it happens, the only potentially useful part of the legacy SLS+Orion+Gateway system, Orion’s heat shield, is fundamentally flawed anyway, as we shall see. So, in sum, for any real mission to any real objective, SLS and Orion are not only suboptimal, they’re entirely superfluous. Delete!

Orion is not just expensive and heavy. It’s also a capsule to nowhere, designed without reference to any mission architecture that resembles our actual solar system. I remember watching a senior NASA program manager (Gerst?) in an interview in about 2013 respond to a question about Orion’s lack of a design reference mission. “Is this a good way to run a space program?” “No!” but I’ve been unable to find the primary source. If you do, send it over!

Let’s look in detail at NASA’s Artemis reference architecture.

This chart shows how NASA’s default plan requires five launches of 3-4 different rockets, including the SLS which is actually more like $5.2b per shot all up, to ferry the crew to NRHO – something they could easily do with any of the other elements, deleting the most expensive and dangerous part all together. In addition, the plan requires not one, not two, but at least five separate space craft: The Gateway (multiple pieces), the transfer stage, descent stage, ascent stage, and Orion. This is NASA’s ticket to a financially sustainable permanent lunar presence?

In contrast, a Starship-derived plan uses Earth orbit rendezvous for refueling, after which the HLS can fly potentially as far as the lunar surface and back to LEO in a single flight. No new space stations. No NRHO rendezvous. No expendable components!

In their October 30 update, SpaceX wrote:

“Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities. In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”

I don’t have inside knowledge but I strongly suspect SpaceX would propose a Starship-only architecture, as it allows the concentration of maximum firepower on the most enabling component – spamming enormous quantities of mass at the Moon.

Elon seems to agree.

Heat shield

Orion may be comically expensive, desperately in need of Ozempic, behind schedule, and pretty much useless but at least it’s not a death trap like the Shuttle, right? Right?

Unfortunately, I do not believe this to be the case.

Since before its first cancellation, Orion’s heat shield has been controversial. While SpaceX chose to develop the newer and more capable PICA for its capsule heatshield, Orion instead opted to use AVCOAT, the same material used in Apollo.

Only, unlike Apollo, Orion relies on an updated formulation that reduces use of spectacularly carcinogenic resin additives, but at least initially maintained the highly labor intensive process of manually injecting the epoxy-like fluid into tens of thousands of honeycomb pockets machined into a stainless steel structural backing layer.

In 2014, NASA flew Orion on a Delta IV Heavy for a high energy heat shield test, finding cracking issues.

So the design was changed to use instead molded blocks that were then assembled into the heat shield.

Unlike Apollo, which flew multiple unmanned test flights on a quick cadence to qualify designs, NASA didn’t refly Orion until late 2022, eight years after the first flight. How much staff churn had occurred by then? I would be shocked if more than 10% of the technical design and assembly crew maintained continuity over this time.

After the Artemis I 2022 test, NASA remained very tight-lipped about heat shield performance, and managed to obstruct investigative journalists from learning the truth for more than two years. Why do you think this was?

The updated heat shield design, after more than 14 years of development, had performed even worse. There was unexpected char loss and more than 100 chipped areas, with pits far deeper than expected.

The capsule survived re-entry and was recovered. Any astronauts on board would have been fine, probably. But unexpected failures are not something from which safety can be derived, even if they didn’t result in total catastrophe.

After Challenger was lost, Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman contributed to the accident investigation and wrote.

“In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the “success” of previous flights. For example. in determining if flight 51-L was safe to fly in the face of ring erosion in flight 51-C, it was noted that the erosion depth was only one-third of the radius. It had been noted in an [F2] experiment cutting the ring that cutting it as deep as one radius was necessary before the ring failed. Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was “a safety factor of three.” This is a strange use of the engineer’s term ,”safety factor.” If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This “safety factor” is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.”

Since 2022, NASA and Lockheed have changed the heat shield design again. Before understanding the root cause of spalling in 2022, which turned out to have been caused by offgassing in the resin binder exceeding the tensile strength of the material, NASA had also been concerned by potential delamination of the blocks from their stainless steel backing, and had altered the AVCOAT formula yet again to make it easier to ultrasonically inspect any one of these 186 blocks for damage prior to launch.

Unfortunately, this formula change will exacerbate the thermal offgassing and spalling issue. By how much, it is impossible to say without another flight test, which will cost another $5.2b plus four years of $3b/year development cost. So $17b?

Just so we’re keeping score, NASA and Lockheed are going to spend four times the total development cost of Crew Dragon and six times the total cost of the HLS contract on their third attempt to successfully build a capsule heatshield using a technology humans have had for more than sixty years, and which other parts of NASA have successfully deployed on Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan!

Only now we’re finally up against the wall on schedule here, so NASA plans to run the third Orion heatshield test as part of Artemis II, with four astronauts on board. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hanson, who have decided to name their spacecraft “Integrity,” will be human guinea pigs for this two decade exercise in profligate waste and shockingly poor program management.

I am genuinely concerned for their safety. Last month, I pointed out the irony of naming a vehicle whose technical integrity and critical heat shield integrity held the lives of the crew, Integrity.

When NASA finally got around to releasing public information about the Artemis I heat shield, they reported that their technical review committee had robustly debated the merits of the Artemis II design change but ultimately agreed unanimously that the risk could be dispositioned by changing the re-entry trajectory to reduce peak heat load.

Immediately two members of the review board came forward denying that they had agreed, underscoring a pattern of half truths and outright lies that have plagued this program from the very beginning. Charles Camarda, a former Shuttle astronaut and expert on heat shields who has recently published a book on NASA’s ongoing cultural challenges around safety and truth, wrote that senior NASA leadership should be ashamed. I’m inclined to agree. Leadership isn’t leadership unless it hurts, and the Orion team evidently needs to be given a hard “no” once in a while.

Don’t believe me, review NASA’s IRT report of August 2024 yourself.

Yikes!

Last December, I wrote:

*NASA decides to fly the Artemis II heat shield as is, saying a) modifying the re-entry profile should mitigate the risk, b) their review board agreed unanimously on this course of action and c) the flight will be delayed another 8 months ($3b of runway) to 2026. However, additional reporting revealed that the heat shield design was modified since Artemis I to make ultrasound verification of the hull-shield bond easier, inadvertently accentuating the design flaw which prevents exsolved gasses from diffusing out of the shield, leading to cracking and spalling. Additionally, Charlie Camarda, a retired astronaut who specialized in heat shields, stated that there were at least two dissenting voices on the review board. To me, this looks like NASA spent nearly three years manufacturing a technical justification to do exactly what they wanted to do anyway. ** * Pencil whipping is an industry term of art for the process by which enough intermediators brandishing clipboards are brought in to gradually launder a “hell no” from engineering into a “A-OK!” from technical management. It was cited as a key cause of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

It’s common enough in the history of aviation that falsifying maintenance records can get you a free vacation courtesy of the Department of Justice for several years.

Crash site of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, the second crash in six months of the brand new Boeing 737-MAX, who later admitted that the crash was caused not by “third world pilots” but by their undocumented FCAS outsourced software hack about which they’d deliberately deceived the regulator.

In 1986, Morton Thiokol engineers including Roger Boisjoly initially warned that overnight freezing temperatures would compromise seals in the solid rocket booster that were already known to be performing below spec. Morton Thiokol management asked to briefly meet separately from NASA program oversight, systematically asked every dissenting engineer to leave the room, then got back on the line to report that everyone in the room was unanimous that the launch could go ahead. Minutes later, millions of school children watched teacher and first “non professional” astronaut Christa McAuliffe, along with her six fellow astronauts, explode like a firework in the upper atmosphere and plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.

17 years later, after many years of ignoring tile damage caused by broken foam, Columbia’s luck ran out, killing another seven astronauts after nearly 16 days on orbit.

It didn’t work for Halliburton. It didn’t work for Boeing. It didn’t work for Challenger. It didn’t work for Columbia. NASA needs to stop pencil whipping fractally, axiomatically compromised systems. Enough is enough!

All this would be inexplicable enough if, indeed, AVCOAT was the only known material from which heat shields could be built. But while Lockheed continues to soak the US taxpayer and play chicken with the lives of NASA’s astronauts with this “flight proven” (but completely different) design, Lockheed happily built a PICA heat shield for JPL’s large Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsule also uses PICA-3.

Why is Lockheed building a worse heat shield from an inferior material with more parts at vastly inflated cost for a capsule that, unlike the Mars rovers, will literally hold the life of four heroes in its tender clutches?

How the hell would I know?

We’re done here

Orion is far too expensive, too slow, too heavy, fundamentally flawed, unsafe, unfit for purpose. I’m calling it. Success is no longer in the set of possible outcomes, and hasn’t been for well over a decade. Let’s stop pretending.

If Lockheed had managed to develop Orion on time and budget, with well designed and functional internal systems, perhaps it would have had a grand career ferrying astronauts to and from the space station, and perhaps even on a few trips around the Moon. Perhaps NASA would not have been left with an eight year capability gap requiring dependency on, and enormous corrupt transfer payments to, our geopolitical adversary Russia even as they continued their lawless extraterratorial adventurism in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Ukraine. By now, with the arrival of Dragon and Starship, this mature capsule with dozens of flights under its belt would be heading for an honorable retirement.

Instead, the greed and disinterest of NASA’s prime contractor and its overseers in NASA doomed this project from the very start. The only saving grace is that it has progressed so slowly that it has not yet had the opportunity to kill another of NASA’s astronaut crews.

It may surprise you to learn that, after 20 years of development and before a single operational flight, it is now NASA’s official policy that both the SLS and Orion should be canceled. But, for some reason, not until after Artemis III, the first human moon landing since 1972. If you’re keeping score at home, this is the second cancellation after the second Augustine Commission recommended ending Constellation.

Why, I wonder, should we shovel another $3.2b/year into this program for as long as it takes to fail to ship a functional product? If Orion’s manifold failures are so evident today that both the executive and NASA leadership have lost faith in flying the capsule with crew just twice and barely four times in total, why not cancel it today?

That’s right, the official policy of the United States of America is to take the $31b we’ve already spent on Orion and the $4b or so more we’ll spend on it in the next few years, plus the $60b or so we’ll spend on SLS and fly a total of 8 people in space for about 10 days each. That is well over $1b per human space day, or something like 300 times more expensive than the already exorbitant ISS operations budget. Ignoring sunk costs and taking into account only the money that would be saved if this entire sorry debacle was shuttered immediately, we would still be spending well over $100m per person per day by the time SLS and Orion launch four astronauts half way to the Moon, then hand them over to a modern, capable HLS spacecraft to finish the job. It takes true creativity to waste this much money on something so useless and dangerous.

NASA cannot justify so brazenly and pointlessly risking the lives of astronauts on the SLS+Orion death trap.

But wait, there’s more

Why stop now? We’re having so much fun. Like my SLS post, I am motivated by the observation that there does not yet seem to be a fully comprehensive list of project failures related to Orion. Even Wikipedia appears to have been scrubbed. Never fear, I’ll go into some detail here. I am, however, quite certain that I’m barely scratching the surface. Let me know what I’ve missed!

Separation bolts

In addition to unexpected heat shield damage on Artemis I in 2022, NASA subsequently found that the separation bolts that attach Orion to the European Service Module had unexpected levels of erosion, as reported in the May 2024 NASA OIG report and also by Jeff Foust at Space News.

Part of the challenge of the bolts is that after separation, the metallic structure penetrates through the AVCOAT heat shield. As a metal, its thermal conductivity, melting point, and coefficient of thermal expansion are markedly different from the refractory heat shield. In Artemis I, three of the four bolts experienced greater than expected “gapping” and intrusion of hot plasma, further compromising the heat shield.

Heat shields are non-trivial. We’ve seen that with SpaceX’s struggles to prevent flap damage on Starship test flights, not to mention the loss of Columbia and the near-loss of STS-27 back in 1988.

Unlike Starship, which is intentionally pushed to failure during the rapid and capital-efficient development of its transformational capabilities, NASA and Lockheed were not expecting the Orion heat shield to break, either by spalling or by excessive bolt erosion. This failure tells us nothing except that the model of reality employed in Lockheed’s Orion engineering practice does not conform with actual reality. In my view, this is excusable for a student project. It’s not acceptable for NASA’s flagship manned Moon rocket.

You would think that after 20 years of development they would have left no stone unturned, no design feature unchecked, and had enough time to do the math correctly. But in my experience, speed often correlates with excellence, because it forces pragmatic design choices and extrudes incompetence from the organization.

As of 2024, NASA’s plan was to mitigate the problem for Artemis II with extra AVCOAT shims and later redesign the part for later capsules? About eight remain under construction despite the current plan to delete the entire program after no more than two more flights.

I don’t even want to think about how NASA program management is going to accidentally-on-purpose bungle the cancellation penalty negotiation. We may well end up spending more just getting Lockheed to go away than we have on the entire commercial space program, cargo, crew, CLPS, HLS, everything. It would still be worth it. Every day we spend on this thing is a day those engineers waste their talent and passion on a dead end project.

Service Module Problems

As outlined above, the profligate weight growth of Orion and underperformance of SLS squeezed the service module to the point where it simply could not carry enough fuel to be useful, with less than 1450 m/s of delta V, significantly less than the barest minimum 1640 m/s required to insert from trans-Lunar injection (TLI) to low Lunar orbit (LLO) and then depart via trans-Earth injection (TEI). Apollo had about 2500 m/s of delta V, enough to also bring the lunar lander from TLI into LLO and have some margin for course corrections.

So we delve into the archives and bring you NASA OIG report IG-16-029, released September 6, 2016. Back then, if you can believe it, everyone maintained they were just two years from EM-1 (Artemis I), which actually flew six years later.

The problem identified as the key schedule risk was ESA’s prime contractor, Airbus Defense and Space, responsible for delivering the ESM, and then running a few months late. I don’t know when the ESM was actually shipped but delivering anything related to the Orion program within three months of schedule is worthy of a medal!

The ESM uses the AJ10 engine (26 kN thrust) for propulsion, previously variants were used as the Shuttle’s intermediate thrust OMS engine, the Apollo service module’s primary engine, and indeed was first flown in 1958 when it launched Vanguard 1 into orbit. Plenty of flight heritage, but also nearly 70 years old and not as efficient or light as modern engines. The primary problem with a lower thrust engine (relative to the payload mass) is that impulsive manoeuvres take longer, depriving missions of the full benefit of the Oberth effect.

Complicating matters, Aerojet itself has endured an avalanche of mergers, consolidations, relocations, layoffs, and is but a shadow of its former self, driving NASA to award a $270m contract in 2021 to improve production and to issue an RFI in 2020 for a new design for Artemis 7+, though what are the chances anything related to Orion is flying by then? Either way, Aerojet is getting over $100m per engine* *that NASA already owns just to refurbish them.

This may seem astonishingly generous, but then the same contractor is getting $420m per engine* *to refurbish NASA’s dwindling supply of the SSME engines that power the SLS core stage. Nice work if you can get it. You, specifically, can’t get it. This kind of hand out isn’t for regular people.

For your reference, SpaceX spent less than $400m developing and building the entire Falcon 9 rocket, including its industry leading Merlin 1D engines and the reuse hardware that has seen this platform launch 140 times this year, with two months still to go. The entire rocket platform that single handedly upholds US interests in space, primarily privately funded and operated, for less than NASA gives their buddies at Aerojet to refurbish one engine that NASA already paid to develop and build decades ago. It’s outrageous!

Artemis I, II, and III have flown/will fly with reconditioned Shuttle OMS engines to sidestep the lack of a current supply chain, which will likely cost over $1b to restart. Supposedly it was cheaper, faster and easier to use these ancient flight heritage components, but it hasn’t worked out.

By comparison, SpaceX spent about $800m developing their entire Cargo Dragon, which had a window and a life support system.

We live in a world where Lockheed/Boeing/Aerojet/Bechtel/Northrop Grumman get 90% of your tax-funded space largesse, and SpaceX delivers 90% global market share. We could be playing baseball on the Moon by now!

One more thing. In 2017 it emerged that the Shuttle OMS engine valving, which was rated to 250 psi, was failing at the Orion’s ESM pressure of 300-350 psi. I’m sure there were valid reasons for increasing the propellant pressure, but this does, again, undermine the assumption that validated flight heritage hardware is faster and easier to use.

I’m sensing a pattern here. A certain whiff of Powerpoint engineering. For some inscrutable reason NASA chose to build the Orion service module around an obsolete engine no longer in production, with sharply limited supply, in such poor condition, that they had to give nearly a billion dollars to the contractor Aerojet to get them ready for flight, after which valves and seals had their usual problems, and the engine performance had to be derated even further.

I really struggle to imagine a more rankly incompetent acquisition strategy. I am not sure whether it is more stupid or more evil. I decline to adjudicate.

ECLSS problems

The Environmental Control and Life Support System has an easily-defined job. Maintain temperature, pressure, and air quality in the capsule. They are quite hard to engineer correctly on the first try, as was found on the USS Nautilus during initial sea trials (amine contamination), the Shuttle first flight (temperature, extreme gas from H2 dissolved in the onboard water supply) and more recently Starliner’s first flight (extreme cold).

The most recent Augustine report “NASA at a Crossroads” spends hundreds of pages setting up a dichotomy between NASA’s allegedly underfunded flagship programs and their glacial progress. If we want real progress, we are told, we need to turn on the infinite money tap.

You can ctrl+f through the entire document for “productivity” at your leisure, it does not come up a single time. One might think that NASA, purportedly the inventor of so much of the technology that drove the 20th century, would be the tip of the spear of US total factor productivity (TFP) growth. One might think…

Despite burning around $1.3b per year for 20 years, the Orion program is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy and never seems to have enough resources to make progress. No doubt Lockheed program managers agree with Norm Augustine (who was Lockheed’s CEO from 1995 until 1997 and remained on the board until 2005) that with only $1.3b per year they really have to search through the couch cushions to find enough money to make payroll.

One of the ways NASA “helps” contractors who spend twice as fast as they are meant to while moving twice as slowly is to “defer” key work until later on. So it was that ECLSS development was deferred from starting in 2016, meaning that Artemis I in 2022 was the first test flight of Orion with a supposedly functional life support system, to be partly tested on a few crash dummies strapped into the chairs. The Orion that flew in 2014 was mostly boilerplate by comparison.

But, as related on page 3 of IG-24-011, “NASA did not fully test Orion’s ECLSS on Artemis I because portions of the required hardware were not installed and crew were not present to allow appropriate exercising of life support systems.”

Not to worry, though. Unlike Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, which performed multiple crewed tests in LEO where bailing out was an option, Artemis II will perform a lunar fly-by on a free return trajectory with essentially zero wiggle room for any kind of ECLSS failure. Once the TLI burn is complete, Orion cannot return