UPI reported Wednesday that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has issued a study on the costs of sending humans back to the Moon under the new Vision for Space Exploration plan. (The article suggests that the report is not widely available and that the wire service somehow managed to obtain a copy, but in fact the Federation of American Scientists has made the report freely available on its web site.) The CRS study, dated May 10 and based solely on budget data provided by NASA, notes that the agency is budgeting $24 billion for the development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle and an additional $40 billion for lunar module spacecraft, new heavy-lift vehicles, and operations. The cost of robotic precursors to the Moon, like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) scheduled for launch in late 2008, aren’t included in the price tag. They’ll likely cost a few billion more, depending on their number and complexity: O’Keefe said back in February that LRO and a follow-on lander would cost about $600 million.
The UPI article notes that this study refutes previous claims of “hundreds of billions [of dollars] critics of the proposal have suggested it would cost.” However, as both the article and the CRS study note, there are no estimates yet of what a human mission to Mars would cost. What the study has done, though, is distill the estimated cost of returning humans to the Moon to a single price tag, something that NASA has resisted doing since the introduction of the vision back in January. Had NASA been more forthcoming about these figures, rather than falling back on the infamous sand chart, it might have alleviated some of the criticism the plan has faced.
Many of the numbers in this CRS report were actually leaked to Aviation Week a couple of months ago. However, now that they are in a CRS report they go from being merely rumors reported in the press to being official NASA numbers. But being official is not the same as being right. This is not yet an independent cost review of the proposal.
All of that said, we must still take early cost estimates with a pound or two of salt. If we look back at Apollo, the initial cost estimates fluctuated quite a bit. NASA has not yet developed things like a mission mode and the milestones necessary to reach their goal, so it is difficult to put a dollar figure on a question mark. The agency needs time to define the program.