Its actually much worse then that. These are not the 'cost' for F9/FH, that is the price. The cost of these launch is like 1/2 to 1/3. Part of the price is also

Its actually much worse then that. These are not the 'cost' for F9/FH, that is the price. The cost of these launch is like 1/2 to 1/3. Part of the price is also amortizing past development cost. In the SLS launch non of that is included. If you take into account the full development cost and amortize them over all the launches (and calculate the interest on government debt) the price is actually way higher then what you have listed. - SLS is more powerful then FH but not by as much as people think. - SLS is human-rated and FH is not, but that is mostly because there is no reason to human-rate the FH. - SLS has the potential to be extend significantly to outperform FH by a much larger margin but that will cost another X billion and another Y years. - SLS was supposed to be cheap by using lots of legacy technology. So in reality Falcon series are actually pretty much newer and more modern in pretty much every design aspect. Of course when SLS was designed Falcon was 'unproven' and the parts of the SLS were 'proven'. However of course this has totally reversed by now. SLS rocket is simply a bad design. It was the outcome of a bad process partly pushed by congress on NASA and partly by NASA engineers own failure to analyse the situation properly. A large part of this is the believe to reuse 'proven' technologies and more importantly to reuse that same workforce. Because it used Cost+ contracting the contractors have no intensive what so ever to perform well. The keep getting their bonus payments for good performance even, something that independent government reviews has pointed out multiple times. So to sum up, there is very little to almost nothing that is gained by SLS. Its a huge part of the NASA budget every year that could be invested in amazing developments. You could fully fund the lunar lander program AND do other preparation for moon bases for example. Edit: This talk form 2011 is quite interesting. I often call it the SpaceX antithesis talk. He even mentions SpaceX a couple of times and references them without naming them. He quite literally says 'if we can't make this affordable they will from in future just let SpaceX do it' and he made it clear their main design goal is affordability and having a program that could meet milestones. Well, that didn't work out so much. See: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweLWCBHpUE?t=0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IweLWCBHpUE?t=0