With the clock ticking, the agency should turn to the US’s high-flying entrepreneurs to get the job done — and get the moon mission back on track
What’s the cost of a good suit these days? At Nasa apparently, it’s about $500m. That’s according to a new audit of the space agency’s 14-year quest to design and build a new generation of spacesuits. Without major changes to the programme, the new duds will take at least four more years to produce, thereby jeopardising NASA’s plan to return to the moon by 2024. Just a few years ago, there might’ve been no way to feasibly accelerate that timeline.
The high cost of exploring space has never really been popular with the public. Even during the heyday of the space race in the 1960s, opinion polls consistently showed that most Americans thought such programs were too expensive. In a survey in 2020 that ranked possible space priorities for President Joe Biden’s administration, climate research was the top choice while avoiding asteroids was number two. Sending people to the moon or Mars ranked at the bottom.
The spacesuit programme has suffered from similar problems. Congress funded it with the idea that Nasa would serve as the chief designer and integrator, while contractors would take care of the parts. In fact, giving work to contractors seemed to be largely the point: There are now 27 of them working on the suit programme. Fortunately, a better approach has emerged in recent years.
In July, Nasa chose SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the Europa Clipper, one of the most important science missions of the decade. In previous years, Congress had required that the craft launch on the SLS. But technical difficulties, combined with an estimated cost of more than $2bn per launch, made the pairing untenable. Using SpaceX’s rocket instead is expected to save taxpayers about $1.5bn.
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