NASA’s megarocket, the Space Launch System, rolls out to its launchpad | Hacker News Reader

NASA’s megarocket, the Space Launch System, rolls out to its launchpad

theverge.com

18 pointssandebert10 comments

How in the world are we going to get this thing scrapped? Each one they build costs another two billion dollars, and there are none in Congress who will vote to kill it.

> Each one they build costs another two billion dollars

$4.1B+. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/01/nasa-auditor-warns-congress-...

> There are other costs, too. Martin said the $4.1 billion estimate is only for production costs and ground operations, “and does not include development costs required to get the Artemis program to this point in time.”

Maybe the implementation needs to be more efficient, but I feel that Artemis, in principle, is a worthwhile endeavor. Not just for the United States, but for humanity. I would be proud to work on it.

The more efficient implementation is SpaceX's BFR. The United States will be able to buy BFR launches that carry bigger payloads than SLS, for a fraction of the cost. The SLS program provides no additional functionality over BFR.

So we're spending billions on this giant Welfare Check to certain congressional districts and aerospace contractors. If we cancelled SLS, we could do a lot of other exciting things with that money.

Free healthcare and rebooted education for all. That'll never happen sadly.

NASA is a pretty small budget item compared to national healthcare.

The United States couldn't do either of those with NASA's budget... And the SLS is not NASA's entire budget.

I believe that space exploration is an incredibly important national priority, even if only as a means of maintaining our space-related military capabilities. Anyone who believes the US can abandon space travel and still be secure against present and future global threats is just a goddamn clown.

But generally we shouldn't pay $2 for a bullet that we could buy elsewhere for $1. We could buy a lot more bullets if we bothered to try to contain our unit costs.

This SLS rocket and the Orion vehicle is what is holding back programs like Artemis. For almost 20 years they have consumed 3 to 5 billion per year. That money invested differently could have financed amazing things.

Even in the absence of Starship it is actually holding back the space program.

Artemis a horrible architecture, its an architecture developed that was FORCED TO use existing SLS/Orion and Gateway programs.

Free from constraints a very different architecture would have developed.

I guess we wait for Starship to go orbitial for the 'emperor has no clothes' moment

Yet another jobs creation program fuelled by politics instead of science/engineering.

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