This doesn't sound right: according to Wikipedia, the cost of the Perseverance rover is $2.7e9 total over 10 years, whereas the cost of SLS is $2.5e9/year (figu

This doesn't sound right: according to Wikipedia, the cost of the Perseverance rover is $2.7e9 total over 10 years, whereas the cost of SLS is $2.5e9/year (figure for 2020). I agree that it's a jobs program, but the rovers on Mars could be too small to be relevant to the calculation. Maybe it should be "instead of high-speed trains to nowhere it's rockets to nowhere". You don't get rovers on Mars because of the spending on SLS, you get them despite the wasteful spending.