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This is a Jobs program, not a Space program. It's working as intended! Most politicians don't care about Space, but Jobs programs are great for re-election and basically unkillable.

Think of it this way: the Jobs spend was going to happen anyway. But instead of high-speed trains to nowhere (hello California!) we get rovers on Mars. Wasteful, but not a total waste.

This doesn't sound right: according to Wikipedia, the cost of the Perseverance rover is $2.7e9 total over 10 years, whereas the cost of SLS is $2.5e9/year (figure for 2020). I agree that it's a jobs program, but the rovers on Mars could be too small to be relevant to the calculation. Maybe it should be "instead of high-speed trains to nowhere it's rockets to nowhere". You don't get rovers on Mars because of the spending on SLS, you get them despite the wasteful spending.

Rocket to nowhere would be great - at least it would be flying

Or even better - without SLS, perhaps you could get two rovers on Mars, a zeppelin on Venus, and a high-speed rail.

Alternative hypothesis: SLS funding supports some other program that cannot be acknowledged and actual amount spent on SLS is very small.

>These companies have perfected the art of milking the taxpayer

I work in defense. Bingo.

How much of this pork can be carved up by companies like SpaceX?

What about drones, missiles, fighter planes, etc.?

SpaceX doesn't have the domain knowledge of a defense prime to be able to really compete with them, at least certainly not today.

Drones, missiles, fighter planes are chock full of proprietary software developed by the primes and hardware developed either by themselves or often Tier 2 or Tier 3 suppliers. Replicating that isn't done overnight and would be an immensely challenging uphill battle against entrenched corporations with decades of experience and very close ties with Washington, which makes competing with NASA look like a walk in the park.

SpaceX would need to hire former lobbyists, managers and engineers from primes and their suppliers and play a really long game to try to get there. Doesn't seem feasible in less than 10 years and even that is an outrageously optimistic timeline.

SpaceX not competing against NASA, instead it was was always competing against commercial launch provider such as ULA.

SpaceX absolutely competes against NASA in SLS case - SLS is so absurd even deep pockets of USA taxpayer can't prevent SLS losing in comparison to SpaceX solutions. Of course, NASA can use more regulatory heavy handing - they had approximately that unfortunate experience with Beal Aerospace - but we'll see if NASA will get to it in the current situation. So far the forecast isn't that dark.

NASA is not the competitor. How can I tell?

Because if SpaceX wins, it's a NASA check they'll be cashing.

Anduril, the company founded by Palmer Luckey with funding by Peter Thiel, is trying to take that startup approach to defense contracting. They raised an additional $200M in venture capital last year. They build drones among other things.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2020/07/01/andur...

SpaceX has already flown classified payloads so they're at the trough with the others.

https://www.space.com/spacex-launches-nrol-108-spy-satellite...

>These companies have perfected the art of milking the taxpayer

Glad some one said something about this. It seems like public and private sector has some how magically merged in US. Shall we remind what happens when you privatize some thing public like prison.

Actually the NASA Act in 2010 required them to build a 130 ton rocket by 2016. However SLS was not planned to fly even with a 70-90 ton in 2017.

Eh, this goes too far.

Old organizations grow slow, new organizations can cut corners and the survivorship bias makes it seem like what they do is obvious and anyone not doing it should have known better.

There are problems with these old organizations that had much of their foundations built on an initial project with unlimited funding to get to the moon as fast as possible. Those problems aren't easy to fix. Some of those problems are because funding is dependent on continually changing legislation and on top of doing things, the government-space-industrial-complex has to manage the government relationship.

I disagree. SLS has nothing to do with the Apollo program. It's built mainly from Shuttle parts, so everything they need is somewhat there already. If you compare that to SpaceX's starship which needed to develop a completely new engine from scratch, it's laughable how slow the progress is. But as somebody said it's a jobs program. And just because you need to manage a relationship with the government doesn't mean your engineers can't do a good job and there are clearly several issues (see e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/13714885009027...)

> Old organizations grow slow, new organizations can cut corners and the survivorship bias makes it seem like what they do is obvious and anyone not doing it should have known better.

Startups cutting corners certainly has some truth (e.g. the drama around SpaceX's last-minute flight approval for its Starship tests comes to mind). However, that doesn't mean the incumbents' processes are free from such problems.

For example, Boeing's new crew capsule encountered problems during testing. Investigating those problems exposed more problems which hadn't been spotted, and this worried NASA enough to launch an independent investigation into Boeing's development processes.

https://spacenews.com/starliner-investigation-finds-numerous...

Even this SLS test could be argued as 'cutting corners': it's a repeat of an earlier test, which aborted early due to the hydraulic gimbal/steering system going outside an acceptable safety margin. The difference between that aborted test and this successful test is that they changed the acceptable safety margin.

I agree with everything... but you can’t compare with starship... it hasn’t flown past 12km yet (admittedly neither has sls).

There is a severe lack of heavy lift capacity in the US

We don't lack for heavy lift -- we have Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy and will soon also have New Glenn and Vulcan.

We lack for super heavy lift, but we've been lacking for that since Saturn V was retired. Some people sometimes count Shuttle as super-heavy, but they cheat by including the Shuttle mass as part of the lift mass.

SLS as is isn't super-heavy either, it requires the planned but un-funded Exploration Upper Stage for that, which is likely never going to get funded.

Starship is super-heavy lift class.

This should be a crime considering that taxpayers are going day to day without enough to eat and no healthcare.

Isn't a large part of it about keeping people employed in jobs that develop and maintain the skills required to create rockets etc? It's both a job creation program and a national security program to ensure there is a constant source of expertise in the area?

Creating jobs by employing people to create an overpriced and inferior product at the expense of the taxpayer doesn't work in a capitalistic economy. It's just throwing away talent and stifles any competition that doesn't have MASSIVE financial backing, which is why it's taken so long to have any kind of commercial competition.

That's only true when excluding international trade and specialization.

In the world we live in, it's more often done to ensure some sort of domestic sourcing for national security critical components.

With the alternative not being that competition would spring up here, but that it would spring up there. (For values of there that are not here)

If you mean "isn't a large part of it about shoveling pork barrel money to selected constituencies", then absolutely. For actual skills, SpaceX, Blue Origin etc seem to be keeping rocket scientists employed just fine.

With pork barrel it's the government, through their elected officials, and, therefore, the people themselves, who plan these strategic job creation and maintenance programs.

SpaceX and Boeing don't answer directly to the people.

Creating engineering jobs at NASA would be one thing, but creating jobs at a private contractor is vastly more expensive. That overhead is all about lining well connected people’s pockets.

It’s almost silly how much effort is put into making things as inefficient as possible. The federal government is intentionally given a bad reputation here, but it’s shocking how much more efficient they are internally vs outsourcing stuff.

I had the same feeling. A lot of the things that NASA develops internally are mindblowing (e.g. the Mars rovers or the Casini probe, both developed by JPL), but everything subcontracted to Boeing or Lookeed endup uber delayed and hyper expensive.

If you are honest with yourself, the JPL missions are often insanely expensive.

The Curiosity rover was supposed to be 1.5 billion, but ended up 2.5 billion, and the main explanation of that was 'to develop a new landing mechanism'. Ok, I guess.

And now Perseverance is again 2.5 billion despite large parts of the rover, landing system and so on, were already 95% developed.

Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance.

Space Nerds bitch less about these programs since they at least are successful compared to the human part of NASA but if you really look at the achievement per $ its not that fantastic.

Perseverance has plenty of sub-contracted parts.

For example, Maxar built several components: https://blog.maxar.com/space-infrastructure/2021/inside-pers...

> Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance.

That is because the required orbit window is only once every ... 26? moments or such.

It's also worth noting that technically JPL contracts to NASA... It's actually part of Caltech under contract to NASA rather than a direct NASA organization.

I think it's somehow related to JPL's need to pay investors. Which doesn't exist.

John Carmack, of Armadillo Aerospace fame (and Quake too), once mentioned how they helped some NASA specialists in a project where their flying platform Pixel was involved. John said, that collaboration was the first opportunity for at least some NASA PhDs to actually work with flying hardware - years spent in NASA before that were all about papers.

> years spent in NASA before that were all about papers.

And the development of knowledge Armadillo relied upon.

Unless they developed their own CFD models for their rocket engine.

If that's the case why can't the output of this massive jobs program at least be something comparable to what SpaceX can produce?

This would make (some) sense if otherwise these skills were going away, but they very much are not.

If NASA budget were used effectively you would create tons of jobs at the private contractors.

SpaceX and to a lesser extent BO, RelativitySpace, Electron and so on are all working on innovative engine and rockets. At SpaceX they are doing things far more advanced then anything on SLS along pretty much every metric.

This is specifically about employing people in Alabama and Utah.

Taxpayers aren’t, but citizens are.

As a European it seems funny to bash at NASA when at the same time the defense expenses in the US are several orders above the SLS cost.

NASA budget is a tiny fraction of the overall defense budget. Question things like military spending before you question NASA.

IIRC, during the Iraqi invasion, the US was spending a full space shuttle per month to find no WMD's in the end.