HOW much does a rocket launch cost? It depends who you ask. Boeing, the firm making NASA’s gigantic Space Launch System (SLS), can’t tell you. According to an internal NASA audit, a maze of contracts means the agency has no way of knowing just how much it is paying to build and launch an individual vehicle. By contrast, SpaceX will tell you exactly how much its Falcon Heavy rocket costs: $90 million per ride. It is right there on its website.
This dichotomy is partly responsible for the Trump administration’s frustration with NASA. For its wildly ambitious push to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 (see “Sorry, but NASA probably isn’t sending astronauts to the moon in 2024”), Trump’s team is willing to use commercial rocket providers if necessary, rather than NASA’s SLS.
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The agency’s reliance on “costs-plus” contracts, in which the government agrees to pay for all additional expenses, once made sense: Boeing was never going to find a non-NASA customer for the Saturn V rocket it helped develop in the Apollo era. But now, as the number of players in space continues to rise, SpaceX’s fixed-price model, based on its confidence in finding other buyers, is the only way to go.
