NASA delays crewed Orion capsule launch two years, to 2023

Nasa has announced that it will delay the launch of its crewed Orion space capsule to April 2023, almost two years later than the original target of August, 2021. The organization claims that this latest day is the result of a rigorous technical review program that incorporates numerous changes to the original EM-2 capsule design. According to Bill Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for human exploration at NASA, these changes should improve the flight characteristics of the vehicle. “We did some changes to reduce weight, took a lot of weight out of the structure for EM-1 and EM-2, [and] reduced the number of cone panels that make up the cone section of the Orion,” Gerstenmaier said.

This new delay, however, means the Space Launch System (SLS) will now spend nearly five years from its first Exploration Mission (EM-1) launch in 2018 to the second launch in 2023. The 2018 mission will send the Orion capsule on a circumlunar trajectory with a splashdown back on Earth seven days later. NASA and Lockheed have collaborated on the design of EM-1 and the Orion capsule; NASA announced it would lighten by up to 25% by making multiple changes to Orion’s panel configurations and reducing the number of welds. The Orion vehicle has held up well in its various tests to-date, including a successful uncrewed test flight last December and a demonstrated ability to land despite the failure of two parachutes.

Why it’s taking so long

Congressional representatives wasted no time taking potshots at President Obama for cutting mission development funds, but there’s plenty to go around on this. As NASA Administrator Charles Bolden pointed out in an op/ed for Wired a few weeks back, it was Congress, not the President, who refused to fund NASA’s requests for its Commercial Crew initiative. From 2010 to 2015, NASA has received roughly a billion dollars less for manned space exploration then the President requested. These delays have multiple long-term impacts: First, they paint NASA’s manned exploration projects as slow-moving and inefficient — why, after all, is it taking decades to assemble new rocket technology? Didn’t we go to the moon and invent the space program from whole cloth in 9 years?

The short answer is “Yes” — but we spent huge amounts of money and focused all of NASA on a single goal to do it. The graph above shows NASA’s budget in constant dollars as a percent of the nation’s GDP. We’ve never come close to funding NASA with Apollo-era levels of cash since we landed on the moon, which partly explains why NASA continues working with rockets and hardware derived from the original Apollo program.

Budgetary scrimping is a significant reason why NASA currently looks the way it does. The reason we didn’t have a space shuttle replacement ready on the launchpad, for example, is because there was no serious funding for developing one. This graph from 2004 illustrates the problem — the ISS and continuing Shuttle operations took up a huge slice of NASA’s budget:

NASA’s ability to fund the development of new spacecraft is critically tied to ending investment in other projects. If the ISS is taken offline rather than extended for several additional years, it’ll be because the organization couldn’t realistically pursue multiple goals at the same time. This is a point that Bolden makes in his op/ed: We currently pay $81 million per American we fly to the ISS and we’ve paid Russia $1 billion for transport since 2010.

I’m not suggesting that NASA’s issues are entirely budget-related, but long development times only exacerbate existing political realities. Each president draws up a different list of space-based objectives than his predecessor, forcing NASA to pivot on a 4-8 year cadence. In the Apollo days, when funding was plentiful, that was still sufficient to accomplish a great deal of manned exploration. Today, the new priorities of any given president could wreck a 10-20 year plan that we would’ve previously executed in half that time. This is then used as further evidence that NASA (read: “the government”) can’t accomplish anything useful or make efficient use of resources. At times, NASA has tried to cancel projects it no longer required, only to see Congress effectively mandate completion of them as a jobs program for key constituencies.

Until and unless America gets serious about funding space exploration, long delays and power struggles are the most we can expect.