Important context…<p>SLS isn’t the rocket NASA designed or asked for in order to achieve its mission goals… it’s the rocket they were forced into using due to lobbying and senate shenanigans, there’s a reason it has the nickname “senate launch system”.<p>The fact the pork barrel project is so bloated it’s “unaffordable” is irrelevant as far as the senators who are voting for it are concerned.<p>My bet is that the senate will just raise the budget because and continue to make SLS happen as they have always done since the SLS program began.
> NASA recently said that it is working with the primary contractor of the SLS rocket's main engines, Aerojet, to reduce the cost of each engine by 30 percent, down to $70.5 million by the end of this decade. [...] And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.<p>If their engine is between 5-100x more expensive than an equivalent engine from competiting companies. Why is it so impossible to be a little bit more agile and consider the other engines?
While true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics.<p>Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place, but it's not as if an efficient way of performing a pointless mission is going to get us better results.
SLS is actually very affordable if seen from the correct angle: a know-how preservation program. After the end of the Cold War, the US reduced drastically its military expenditure. The danger was that some day will come (like, you know, the 2020's) when the US will need to restart the missile assembly lines. How do you keep enough people trained at an affordable cost? Well, you keep them busy building a rocket that never launches. Any single launch is money down the drain. You still need to launch, because if you don't you are in danger of fooling yourself: you think you maintained a qualified workforce, but actually they are all impostors. But other than quality assurance, the launches themselves are not important, they are just a cost. So you want to launch as few times as possible.
The affordability isn’t relevant - in fact, the lack of affordability is pretty much the <i>point</i>. SLS is a jobs program, pork barrel spending to keep the MIC contractors and the voters who are dependent upon them sweet. The more it costs, the better it plays in whatever Poughkeepsies or Peorias they make the gold-plated doohickeys in.
I don't understand how NASA is paying $100M for a space shuttle engine designed 40 years ago. R&D has already be amortized so its just manufacturing the thing.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25</a>
@1970-01-01 well timed other submission <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422115">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37422115</a><p>The comparison in space enthusiasm and planning is ... significant.<p>Wernher von Braun wrote a 281 page engineering text masquerading as a fiction novel to pitch Mars.<p>Current NASA leadership wrote:<p>- Stabilize the flight schedule<p>- Achieve learning curve efficiencies<p>- Encourage innovation<p>- Adjust acquisition strategies to reduce cost risk
I love it when someone says they’re going to cut costs by “Encouraging Innovation”. Almost as much as “Reducing Fraud”.<p>Political types love these announcements they’re going to get something for nothing.
You have to view the cost of SLS like insurance. Premiums are also a huge waste of money until you need to make a claim. In this case, we didn't; SpaceX came through with flying colors. But that was far from a sure thing 15 years ago, and the risk of being left without access to space was real.
Something I've observed about catastrophically bad projects is that there can be a point where the enormity of the failure is impossible to acknowledge, and hence the failure ceases to exist in some sense. Once the double-think kicks in, it becomes strangely easy to forge ahead and commit. After all, there are no acknowledged problems!<p>It's essentially the "Emperor has no clothes" story, but nobody believes the little boy telling the truth, because the "emperor is naked" is such an absurd statement to make. That's just <i>silly</i>, so of course there must be a deeper truth, a greater story, a hidden meaning.
I have an incredible idea, give the SLS vertical landing and relaunch capability.<p>Or just trade each $2 billion [0] SLS launch for a mix of 2000 $1 million [1] Starship launches to orbit, from orbit to destination, and/or returns.<p>Even if Starship launches have a significant likelihood of costing more than that, just 2 Starship launches per SLS seems like a bargain.<p>20 would be fantastic.<p>200 would be surreal.<p>2000 would be … what on (off) Earth could NASA do with 2000? Put all of NASA, its entire supply chain, and the Senate on Mars! O_o<p>Then achieve a further cost reduction for trips to Mars surface: just the cost of the electrical current required to operate a Mars habitat airlock.<p>Talk about time and cost efficiency!!<p>What is ridiculous is the crazy logic of all this is fairly sound, due to the beyond ridiculous (for today) SLS costs.<p>I have a funny feeling that the SLS’s days are numbered.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship</a>
Thankfully the rest of the worlds superpowers, India, China and Europe are run by cronies too, so it all evens out.<p>I don’t think these mega empires are good for the world, too much central power and too many management layers between those who rule, and those who do.<p>A lot of rules to follow that often seems arbitrary.
NASA's problem with the SLS is not really its high cost. A 'high cost' is strictly relative.<p>NASA's problem is lack of funding. That is something that can't be fixed in today's world. Because the US just does not have the amount of spare cash lying around like it did in the 1960s.<p>That lack of NASA funding is why I predict that the US will never again put men on the Moon, no matter what all the pundits try to tell us. <i>There just ain't no spare cash, period.</i>