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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thought: Starship just expended more engines on a *test* (39?) than I believe the entire SLS program has budgeted through the end of the 2020's (16 from shuttle + 18 new = 34?).

edit: Never mind, it's slightly less – see the comment below correcting me. The SLS program has 40, not 34, RS-25's.

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Yep. And they are trying to get Raptor 2 to less than $2M a pop (iirc). The "cattle not pets" of rocket science.

SLS is at $100 million apiece and has no realistic path forward for improving that. Fail-and-iterate was never even an option for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Shuttle_program ("contract extension to manufacture 18 additional RS-25 engines, with associated services, for $1.79 billion")

I think they are actually below the $2M mark already and the actual goal is to get to 250k per engine (At least for non gimbal sea-level engines).

Raptor2 also is being upgraded with things like electric gimbaling vs hydraulics. I think that was a hydraulic unit at the bottom of super heavy that exploded a few sec after lift off. So... electric gimbaling it is then. ;)

It's 16 + 6 (part of the restart contract) + 18 = 40.

And that doesn't count the 2nd stage which, for 10 flights, should be 3 * 1 + 7 * 4 = 31 RL-10s.

But yeah - a very different architecture.

They're building Raptor engines at a pace of one per day though !

i'm a big fan of spacex and poked fun at SLS with all their delays and stuck valves etc. Well now it's the SLS fans turn to do a little ribbing. I still think starship will win out in the end but I'll tip my hat to SLS.. occasionally.

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