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Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

I was curious, so I looked up the budget. Development of Europa Clipper cost about $2.5 billion of which $1.1 billion was the spacecraft, $475M was payload, $200M was the launch vehicle (about $230M saved by not using SLS), $160M for ground systems, $60 M for testing. Formulation of Europa Clipper cost $1.2 billion. Operating it will cost about $80M per year.

Details on the Europa Clipper budget are at https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/nasa-fy-2024...

(Edit: fixed billion/million typo)

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> (about $230M saved by not using SLS)

Since SLS launches are now upwards of $2B per launch by some estimates, how does this math work? Wikipedia also suggests $2 billion saved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Europa_Cli...

I bet you it’s what the project would have been charged by the SLS program, but SLS would have lost a billion by providing a launch.

In the NASA budget, -$230M is the "change from base year estimate" for the launch vehicle. In other words, the launch vehicle ended up being less than half the price of the initial budget estimate. (This is unusual; almost everything goes up from the initial budget.) Originally, congress mandated that Europa Clipper use the SLS to launch. But after vibration problems turned up with SLS, it would take $1 billion to redesign the Clipper. They say the SLS would have cost $1 billion for the launch vehicle. So I think the way the math works out is that SLS rocket cost much more than originally budgeted ($800M more?) and it would have cost another $1 billion to redesign Clipper. So abandoning SLS saved $230 million compared to the original budget but saved $2 billion compared to what SLS would have ended up costing.

SLS cost far more then $1 billion. They are not even gone hit the 2 billion $ number anytime soon.

So in reality this saved more money then the complete cost of the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and re-usability program.

> $200 billion was the launch vehicle

Million I'd assume?

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