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Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a disposable rocke
by DennisP 7y ago
Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a disposable rocket the size of Starship that costs at least a billion dollars per launch, or $10,000/kg payload.
Meanwhile SpaceX is spending less than one billion dollars total for Starship/Super Heavy, and at scale it'll launch payload for $20/kg. How much more money would NASA have for observation satellites with $20/kg launch?
Probably even more than you'd think because when launch is cheap, you can also afford to make your satellite cheaper. If it fails, it's not so expensive to launch another one.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoThat's strange. Why is NASA doing sls instead of just contracting SpaceX? From your comment it sounds like SpaceX is much more efficient at launching things into space than NASA, and I'd like to know how that came to be the case.
- DennisP 7y agoVarious reasons: Good: NASA started SLS years ago, and had no idea that SpaceX would be so successful. They also didn't know SLS would take as much time and money as it has. Bad: NASA is at the mercy of Congress and SLS has a lot of political support. It spreads jobs over a lot of districts and pays big money to major defense contractors. At this point it's a huge sunk cost and embarrassing to cancel. Ugly: Those contractors work on cost-plus contracts so they have little incentive to make a cheap launcher. To illustrate, the SLS uses Space Shuttle main engines, which cost several times as much per unit thrust as the Saturn V's engines. That was worthwhile for the Shuttle since it reused them. Naturally, NASA's contractors thought they were perfect engines to throw away on every flight.
- pfdietz 7y agoIt's not called the Senate Launch System for no reason.