While those numbers are an OK ‘ROM’, there are a couple issues.

The marginal cost is only as low as ‘about $100M’ if you only account for the marginal costs of ‘hardware’, like refurbished SRBs and the ET.

There truly are other costs beyond SRBs and ETs for a Shuttle launch. Based on this, I have seen other estimates of ‘marginal costs’ that account for the other issues, which are in the $300-400 million range. ”

I think you may be confusing _average_ cost with _marginal_ cost.

The _average_ cost of a Shuttle flight is the Shuttle budget over some timeframe divided by the number of flights during that timeframe. Depending on the timeframe and flight rate, it’s usually is in the $500 million range, and may get as low as the $400 million figure that you mention above.

The _marginal_ cost of a Shuttle flight is the cost of adding one more flight to the Shuttle manifest and budget. It really is driven by the extra hardware that you note above (ETs, SRBs), plus maybe some additional workforce costs (overtime, depending on the flight rate). It’s usually in the $100 million range. The only way I could think of driving the marginal cost into the $300-400 million range would be to drive the annual flight rate into the double digit range, in which case an expansion of the Shuttle workforce and facilities would be required at some point (at say the 10th, 11th, or 12th flight), the costs of which would be applied to the marginal costs of the additional flight that required them.

GAO quotes a marginal cost of $84 million per Shuttle flight and an average cost of $435 million per Shuttle flight in this 1999 report (see the first paragraph on page 2):

http://www.gao.gov/archive/1999/ns99177.pdf

Taking about a decade of inflation since 1999 into account, those figures are pretty close to the $100 million and $500 million WAGs that I threw out.

“On the issue of “Fixed Costs”, again your $3-4 Billion is probably about right, but it is dangerous to leap to the conclusion that NASA can save the entire $3-4 Billion and apply the funding as it likes to other priorities.

Some of those fixed costs are things like JSC Engineering Directorate and MOD costs, that are allocated to the Shuttle budget under full-cost accounting.

When we shut down the Shuttle, unless there is a major RIF, there will not be massive lay-offs at MOD and the JSC Engineering Directorate, to free up the funds to pay for other projects that we would like NASA to do.

I expect that JSC and SOMD will try to re-allocate most (if not all) of those costs to the ISS under full-cost accounting, or to NASA’s overhead budgets.”

The costs of the civil servants in engineering service pools (like the JSC Engineering Directorate) and in the Mission Operations Directorate are not bookkept under the “Space Shuttle” budget in the “Space Operations” account. Rather, civil servant salaries, benefits, etc. are bookkept under the “Center Management and Operations” in the “Cross-Agency Support” account. (In terms of the budget display that goes to Congress, there is no longer any full cost accouting. Griffin killed it.) So if the Shuttle program and budget magically disappeared tomorrow, the civil servants supporting the Shuttle program would still get their paychecks. So it’s not a question of how you fund civil servants after Shuttle goes away. It’s just a question of what you have them work on next and whether their skills match that work. You may still choose to RIF, but it will be driven by workforce skill issues, not budget issues.

Where you’re right, though, is that the Shuttle budget probably covers some contractor costs for the engineering pools and MOD. (I’m not certain, but pretty sure, of this.) New programs would have to decide whether they want to continue to pay for those contractors (if their contracts and skill sets could be repurposed) or whether those contracts would need to be terminated/let go in favor of new procurements.

Hope this helps… FWIW…

Major Tom,

While those numbers are an OK “ROM”, there are a couple issues.

The marginal cost is only as low as “about $100M” if you only account for the marginal costs of “hardware”, like refurbished SRBs and the ET.

There truly are other costs beyond SRBs and ETs for a Shuttle launch. Based on this, I have seen other estimates of “marginal costs” that account for the other issues, which are in the $300-400 million range.

On the issue of “Fixed Costs”, again your $3-4 Billion is probably about right, but it is dangerous to leap to the conclusion that NASA can save the entire $3-4 Billion and apply the funding as it likes to other priorities.

Some of those fixed costs are things like JSC Engineering Directorate and MOD costs, that are allocated to the Shuttle budget under full-cost accounting.

When we shut down the Shuttle, unless there is a major RIF, there will not be massive lay-offs at MOD and the JSC Engineering Directorate, to free up the funds to pay for other projects that we would like NASA to do.

I expect that JSC and SOMD will try to re-allocate most (if not all) of those costs to the ISS under full-cost accounting, or to NASA’s overhead budgets.

Thoughts?

– Al

That’s not what I wrote. I wrote that there is not a cut to the NASA budget over five years (2009-2013) and actually a small increase. Over five years, the White House and Congress have added to and moved money forward in NASA’s budget, which boosts the agency’s purchasing power and gives Constellation a budget profile closer to what the program has always desired.

“yet I’ve seen numerous articles”

Don’t rely on secondary sources when you can go to the primary sources. This is especially true for budget figures, which, with the exception of black programs, can always be examined in greater detail by going to the President’s Budget Request, the relevant agency budgets, and congressional legislation, which are all available to the public. You can run the numbers yourself — NASA’s 2009 and 2010 budgets can be found here:

http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html

It was Griffin himself who first mentioned the $3 billion figure at the space prom (when the FY 2010 budget was actually still embargoed, which is a no-no). The $3 billion figure is misleading because it doesn’t recognize all the funding that was added in the near-years, where it’s more valuable to NASA generally and to Constellation in particular. It may unfortunate that the figure keeps getting repeated in secondary sources (the press) without any analysis of the primary sources (the budgets). But that doesn’t mean that those secondary sources are providing an accurate assessment — reporters aren’t hired for their accounting skills.

“This article also connects that $3 billion cut to the A-Teams expected primary goal,”

Who said that? I already provided a link to and quoted the terms of reference for the Augustine review committee in my earlier post above. Why insist on making stuff up even when presented with the primary sources in black and white?

“what to do without Ares V since the money has been removed by Obama’s OMB.”

C’mon, Ares I is now in the $35-40 billion range. Do you really think that Ares V is going to cost only a fraction of that, $3 billion-plus, and be ready by 2020?

NASA spends about $10 billion per year on its human space flight programs. That’s over $100 billion through 2020. A few billion cut is not going to make or break that budget. But tens of billions of dollars of cost growth in a single project certainly will.

Blue-ribbon panels like the Augustine review committee are created to deal with multi-ten billion dollar problems, like space station cost growht at the beginning of the Clinton Administration or Constellation cost growth now. They’re not created to deal with few billion dollar problems. OMB takes care of those, like when the ISS program was overrunning by $5 billion at the beginning of the Bush I Administration and CRV, Hab, etc. were terminated.

FWIW…

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/Panel052709.xml&headline=Spaceflight%20Panel%20Wants%20Open%20Minds&channel=space

Where the subject comes up at the second to last paragraph.
This article also connects that $3 billion cut to the A-Teams expected primary goal, what to do without Ares V since the money has been removed by Obama’s OMB.

Shuttle’s fixed costs are more in the $3-4 billion range. Marginal costs are only about $100 million per flight.

FWIW…