Latest post is more of a continuation of this one: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls

Latest post is more of a continuation of this one: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/03/04/sls-what-now/ I'm going to presume what author thought and quote him: ------ What does NASA do with teams that cost a few billion dollars a year to feed and whose main expertise is building rockets and space probes whose entire architectural philosophy is threatened by current launch costs, let alone the order of magnitude improvement that’s in the pipeline? The Perseverance Mars rover cost $2.4 billion, which works out to a few thousand salaries for just under a decade. Thousands of people are needed to build this rover because landing stuff on Mars is so hard that subsystem masses must be tracked to a tenth of a gram, on a system that weighs a tonne. The whole thing is meticulously handcrafted from custom silicon, PCBs, titanium tubes, motors, cameras, and other awe-inspiring instruments. Starship will be able to land 100 of them per flight. Now what? How can NASA feed a team that makes one feather light rover per decade for a billion dollars if the demand just jumped by a factor of a thousand and the unit cost fell by the same amount? Set up a production line? Work out how to make them with a team of ten? Build one every two weeks? In short, in a world where SLS’s ongoing failure is justified and/or ignored while Starship races towards transformational capabilities, NASA needs to think very deeply about its place in a human spaceflight program that appears poised to proceed without NASA at its center. ----- So the point is it seems to be a question - what is NASA planning to do AT ALL in the world where Starship is flying?