"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.”

  • @Bye@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48•2 years ago

    Was Saturn V affordable?

    Because maybe the question isn’t whether it’s affordable but whether we are budgeting enough money.

    • Flying SquidEnglish
      15•2 years ago

      Maybe if we gave a little less to SpaceX, NASA could afford to do more.

      • @InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21•2 years ago

        Can I ask: do you actually believe NASA builds their own rockets themselves? Like out back in their shed with a table saw and pliers?

        The prime contractor on the sls is boeing.

      • @weew@lemmy.caEnglish
        14•2 years ago

        If 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.

      • @Quacksalber@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1•2 years ago

        Even 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.

      • MrSpArkleEnglish
        -1•2 years ago

        That 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.

    • @AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      There 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

  • @gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    9•2 years ago

    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.

  • Tsiolkovsky’allEnglish
    6•2 years ago

    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.

    • @turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      There’s an entire genre of political/economic/military writing that is essentially the epitome of “perfect is not the 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.