[tempnow987]

Except you look at what they are spending on the entire SLS infrastructure vs what they are getting (vs other science options and/or space exploration options) and basically your mind is blown at how wasteful NASA is.

SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.

[FactolSarin]

I don't think NASA would have chosen the SLS platform though. It was basically mandated by Congress.

[el_toast]

Same story with shuttle and that's why it looks the way it is and was as expensive as it was. It would have been a completely different vehicle if Congress weren't meddling.

[eggy]

I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing.

I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).

I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.

I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

[tempnow987]

The issue here is a couple of things:

- Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat.

- The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations

- NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System").

So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy!

So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)!

Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.

[photochemsyn]

NASA's manned mission division does seem to have the bigger problem with bloated contracting budgets and inefficiency, relative to the rest of the organization. I'd guess that's due to direct political influence (the Richard Shelby - Bill Nelson effect in that case). From 2010:

https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html

[tempnow987]

Yep, the whole SpaceX thing was unpopular with Biden admin - I think they brought Bill Nelson back from retirement - he'd really fought for SLS and fought against "wasting" money on SpaceX. The Biden admin have some kind of beef with Elon.

They also needed to get Kathy L out who had started to push down manned mission cost (crew dragon etc) and I think they succeeded there - there was a push to get her off new projects and into just operations I think to keep her from disrupting the pork - even just by showing the contrasts to other approaches.

[akira2501]

> SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket.

That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only.

> The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!).

We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars.

What do you think this _should_ have cost?

[tempnow987]

SLS as currently launched doesn't have enough delta-v to even really get to the moon with Orion.

That's why SpaceX is supposed to fly an absolute gargantuan amount of mass both into lunar orbit, then down to the moon, then back off the moon! They are supposedly going to do 5,000 tons out to the moon, orbit, land and take off the entire 5,000 ton starship. Payload may be 100 tons +. It's a big if, but if they can anything close to this it'll be crazy.

Orion is weirdly heavy for the SM, and the SM is weirdly weak (I don't think it got redesigned when SLS came along).

They are trying to fix this at $600m - $1B / year with the Block 1B upper stage.

But SLS after $20B (+ another $20B for orion) definitely CANNOT get folks to moon and back. Orion payload is truly tiny.

I think SLS will be good for maybe some flyby missions to the moon? One way to keep it going would be to do a one rocket mars sample return option / dump Orion totally... That actually seems like a useful approach.

But its not clear to me that old space can do a fixed price contract, they are so used to cost+ they really need to be able to overrun budget. All these projects had initial budgets that are fractions of what they are now but with cost+ that actually is a positive for the contractor. And the headaches on a mars accent and return vehicle would be high.

[Analemma_]

NASA also thought the Space Shuttle was going to get cheaper per-launch after a couple years of service, and they turned out to be completely wrong. Why should we trust that this time will be different?

NASA's own Inspector General says, "... NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic" and "... a single SLS will cost more than $2 billion through the first 10 SLS rockets ... " [0]

[0]: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pd...