In order to lower costs, Lockheed Martin wants to get more American parts into the European-built service module for the Orion capsule.
And why do they want to lower costs? It ain’t for the normal free market reasons you’d expect. Instead, the Frankenstein project that is SLS/Orion has the U.S. building the capsule while Europe builds the service module. However, Europe doesn’t want to spend the money to build two service modules. Instead,
for financial reasons, ESA prime contractor Airbus Defense and Space may provide only “one and a half” service modules, Larry Price, Lockheed’s Orion deputy program manager, said in an interview here.
“They may not complete both of them, depending on funding,” Price said. But “we think we can drive Europe’s cost down so they can deliver two complete service modules” by steering the European company toward American suppliers already working on the Orion crew module. “If we use common parts, they can be lower price,” Price said. He added that ESA is set to deliver a full service module for the 2017 flight.
Read the article. It better than anything I can say will make it clear how much of a dead end project SLS/Orion really is. The rocket costs more than $14 billion per launch, has no clear mission, and the contractor (Europe) for the capsule’s service module only intends to build one and a half. What will NASA do after that? No one has any idea, nor does anyone at NASA have any plans to figure this out.