NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable
NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable
"At current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable."
NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable::"At current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable."
The entire NASA budget is like 5% of the US military budget. Unaffordable my ass.
104Just because you CAN do something, doesn't always mean you should. It's unaffordable because it's not reusable, and we need to stop making these types of rockets now we have a leg up on more sustainable/reusable and affordable solutions.
20Yeah we should just shut down SLS so all the money will ... wait what will they do with the money again?
Bureaucrat: I mean we could track space asteroids but the chances of them falling in my lifetime are kind of slim that money would look a lot better in my pocket...
4
Was Saturn V affordable?
Because maybe the question isn’t whether it’s affordable but whether we are budgeting enough money.
61Maybe if we gave a little less to SpaceX, NASA could afford to do more.
18If NASA cancelled every single contact they had with SpaceX... they might be able to afford 1/3rd of an SLS launch. Or maybe not, because then they'd have to start paying Russians for rides up to the ISS.
SpaceX is saving NASA boatloads of money. Which Congress is forcing them to waste on SLS.
22SpaceX is getting 2-3 bn dollars for Starship HLS development, most of the funding is coming from SpaceX itself. SLS costs up to 4 bn per flight. I'm not even going to mention the insane cost-overruns and years of delays associated with NASA's cost-plus contract with Boeing to build the damn thing.
SLS is a sunk cost fallacy and jobs program.
20Even then, commercial launch providers get much further with less money. Sure, if NASA had more budget, they could afford the SLS program. But the commercial launch providers show that they could be more efficient with the money they do have.
3That would destroy US space capabilities. Just because Elon is a racist dipshit doesn’t mean we should stop building the best rockets in the world.
Honestly if we have less money to Boeing and more to spacex, NASA would be way better off.
1
Even considering that, the SLS is poor value for money. It’s basically a dumber space shuttle that you throw away. It’s a parody of 1970s technology.
We can, and should, do better for that price tag.
12No, and that's why we don't launch then anymore.
4There was no alternative to what Saturn V did at the time. The SLS program is clearly going about things in a very expensive way and we have private alternatives that may be sufficient at a fraction of the price
4That was my immediate thought, it's space exploration, it's meant to cost more than is reasonable or affordable, because monetary rationale has never been a factor in it. Even if it did pay out in the long run with inventions and discoveries in the past, it's never going to make budget sense because exploration and pushing our specie's boundaries shouldn't be. It's a miracle what space agencies are/were able to accomplish with super strict budgets in the past, but in the end there's only so much you can do by cutting corners and letting the private sector fill the gaps
2but the SLS isn't pushing boundaries. It's just reusing leftover space shuttle parts and isn't meant to do much more than what Atlas V managed. And still somehow costs billions per launch.
8
Eric Burger has been against SLS for like 15 years, it’s his whole schtick. Loves making points about how expensive it is, about how late it was, and that it means NASA can’t design rockets anymore. Never talks the other side - how Congress hamstrung the design, how it was consistently under-funded, and how it was shackled to Boeing at the same time that the entire company hit the skids.
SLS was forced to be a Frankenstein rocket slash jobs program by legislative fiat. Of course it’s not sustainable in a financially-constrained environment - it was designed to spread money and jobs just as much as it was designed to deliver payloads.
It’s still the only thing that can put an Orion vehicle in orbit, and Orion is the only vehicle we’ve got today that can get crew off the earth and to lunar orbit, and Artemis I was a masterpiece launch of a first-build rocket.
Another SLS hit piece from Ars Technica isn’t news, it’s just noise.
27There's an entire genre of political/economic/military writing that is essentially the epitome of "perfect is
notthe enemy of good". Where the existing systems or projects, being less than perfect because of decades of compromises, are trashed because they're not as perfect as [insert author's golden child here].They're not necessarily wrong that whatever alternative could be better. They're just incredibly unrealistic to think that their project would be the one that springs fully formed from the launchpad as they envisioned.
The F-35 is another common target of "this was the worst plan/plane ever". Usually they leave out is that most of the chief opponents of the F-35 were also against the F-15, because they wanted simple expendable planes that are good at dog-fighting
because WW2 was cool. They leave that part out because the F-15 is/was the most successful air superiority fighter ever made.6
I mean, sure, but you also have to remember that the Artemis/SLS program was crafted to be politically expensive to kill, not financially efficient.
I agree that it’s exorbitantly expensive and a comically inefficient use of funding, but congress passed a series of laws on the project mandating that certain components be made in certain areas by certain companies, as a way to give multiple states and constituencies skin in the game. Once SpaceX and reusable rocket tech came onto the stage and started to mature, SLS was always going to be on the path to irrelevance.
21This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission.
"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.
The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage.
"Some NASA officials told us that changes to Artemis mission dates should not affect the SLS program’s cost estimate," the report states.
"Other officials noted that the program’s cost estimate would be expected to increase to account for the delay to the Artemis IV mission, which shifted from 2026 to 2028."
The original article contains 738 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
14Good bot.
5
Who's "everyone"?
4SLS is an intey step, but it doesn't scale.
I hope NASA keeps investing in SpaceX and more importantly SpaceX competition.
We need more reusable rockets. RocketLab, Blue Origin, etc.
2Yeah but like.. not owned by one single person, unless we want one man/company to be a major wartime influence a la starlink
6
What is SLS?
2[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System](its basically NASA's replacement) for the shuttle we've known forever. I had to look it up myself as the article writer seemingly assumes foreknowledge of the SLS program.
I do wonder how much of the cost overrun is a lack of oversight and so yet another handout to northropgunman and boeing, but that's just my good ol go-to suspicion tbh.
12Standard lizard shield, its the earth forcefield that keeps reptillian ships from landing on the planet. Pretty soon this place is going to be literally crawling with the scaly bastards.
4There's actually an article that tells you what it is. Oh look, it's linked in the OP!
From the first sentence of the article:
NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
-1Not that I expect someone named "friend of Satan" to be nice, but sometimes things that seem obvious to some people are not obvious to others. For example, if the milk bottle in the fridge is a different color (it's blue label instead of red for some reason) then I sometimes can't find the milk. Seems pretty obvious to most people, but it's not to me. Give people benefit of the doubt. They may have a learning disability or something.
7They use the phrase but never associate it with the acronym OR explain what it is. It's shit writing.
7
There's actually an article that tells you what it is. Oh look, it's linked just above your comment!
Spoiler: space launch system
1