"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
    381·
    2 years ago

    Was Saturn V affordable?

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

      • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
        173·
        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.

        • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
          921·
          2 years ago

          It’s just hate for musk, people who hate musk have blinders on and think every company he has any input into is a scam.

          • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
            81·
            2 years ago

            Nah, I hate musk as much as the rest of them. SpaceX is the only company he has that’s worth a damn. I was really kind of happy when he started screwing with Twitter because he has less time to screw up SpaceX.

            Now, that said, SpaceX needs competition. I will take us for musk to have one bad trip hop in there and start screwing that company over. If NASA is fully dependent on them…

            SpaceX isn’t doing anything another company can’t do. It’s just that Boeing owns our f****** government.

              • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                Starlink is horrible on many fronts. Just the amount of trash they’ve thrown into low orbit is crap. Short-term disposable satellites are not great. Now he’s taking and giving access based on his own political wants.

                Tesla’s a pretty mixed bag. Privacy issues, quality issues, resell issues, repair issues, self-driving car failures. All the other stuff they do really well everybody else also does well.

                All this stuff started off really strong when he started going batshit crazy things started getting less attractive

              • SMillerNL@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                Tesla is publicly traded and as far as I can tell Starlink is not a company but rather a SpaceX project.

      • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        51·
        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.

    • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      Even considering that, the SLS is poor value for money. It’s basically a dumber space shuttle that you throw away. It’s a parody of 1970s technology.

      We can, and should, do better for that price tag.

    • Anahkiasen@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      That was my immediate thought, it’s space exploration, it’s meant to cost more than is reasonable or affordable, because monetary rationale has never been a factor in it. Even if it did pay out in the long run with inventions and discoveries in the past, it’s never going to make budget sense because exploration and pushing our specie’s boundaries shouldn’t be. It’s a miracle what space agencies are/were able to accomplish with super strict budgets in the past, but in the end there’s only so much you can do by cutting corners and letting the private sector fill the gaps

    • 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

  • Tsiolkovsky’all@lemmy.worldEnglish
    201·
    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
      5·
      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.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    12·
    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.