Now, you might think that NASA would ask industry to solve this problem. Eventually, United Launch Alliance was developing a more powerful upper stage for its Vulcan rocket, the Centaur V, which used the same propellant as the core stage of the SLS rocket. And Blue Origin was also developing the BE-3U, a powerful upper stage engine powered by hydrogen. These options were cheap, available, and…summarily ignored.
10 years, billions of dollars, and not much to show
Congress, smelling the jobs, wanted NASA to develop a new high standard. So in 2016, lawmakers allocated $85 million for initial work at the upper level, and have since awarded more than $3.5 billion.
For the development of the second stage of the rocket.
With engines (RL-10s) that have been flying in space for six decades.
And after all this, a decade later, it has taken years to get the upper stage ready to fly.
In some ways, Exploration was the perfect vehicle for upper stage pork. This not only required largesse between Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne (for the engines), but also required a huge new launch tower in Florida. This was good for the Exploration Ground System program at Kennedy Space Center.
The original cost estimates of these projects are always instructive to look back at. Boeing’s initial contract to build the Exploration Upper Stage started at $962 million, and NASA plans to launch the rocket on the SLS’s second flight in 2021. Oops. As for the launch tower, the initial estimate for its cost was $383 million, but recently, it was moving north of $2 billion. So we’re talking billions and billions and billions of dollars for a relatively straightforward upper stage using off-the-shelf engines and a big launch tower.
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