NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable::“At current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable.”
Was Saturn V affordable?
Because maybe the question isn’t whether it’s affordable but whether we are budgeting enough money.
Maybe if we gave a little less to SpaceX, NASA could afford to do more.
SpaceX is getting 2-3 bn dollars for Starship HLS development, most of the funding is coming from SpaceX itself. SLS costs up to 4 bn per flight. I’m not even going to mention the insane cost-overruns and years of delays associated with NASA’s cost-plus contract with Boeing to build the damn thing.
SLS is a sunk cost fallacy and jobs program.
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.
Boeing used to be a good engineering firm.
Yes, up until mid 90s
As certified by Boeing?
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.
Not a scam, but a tool to help enemies of the democracy.
SpaceX is a tool that directly aids democracy. Without it, we still wouldn’t have independent access to space. We would be relying on the Russian Soyuz to carry us to the ISS, and due to the current situation, I don’t think they’d have let us continue riding the Soyuz if we didn’t have our own method.
SpaceX existed before Musk bought it. It could have ended being used by the NASA. Then you seem to forget the ESA and their Ariane launchers.
You’re conflating Tesla with SpaceX, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. ESA doesn’t have a human spaceflight system.
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.
So Tesla and starlink don’t count?
Tesla is publicly traded and as far as I can tell Starlink is not a company but rather a SpaceX project.
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
To be fair, based on his companies the odds of that bet are quite good.
So Tesla is a scam? SpaceX is a scam? Starlink is a scam? Wut???
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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
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.
There’s an entire genre of political/economic/military writing that is essentially the epitome of “perfect is
notthe 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.
Who’s “everyone”?
What is SLS?
Standard lizard shield, its the earth forcefield that keeps reptillian ships from landing on the planet. Pretty soon this place is going to be literally crawling with the scaly bastards.
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I read it and still didn’t see it.
Lemmy has become a shithole.
They reply could have been nicer, but it is in the article.
Everybody please be nice and Lemmy won’t be a shithole.
Lemmy has become a shit hole. After the reddit API thing, I was full in for the switch. After a couple months, my third party app still works over at Reddit and there are actually enough non dickheads to generate some useful comments.
When that Relay stops working for free at Reddit I’ll find somewhere else.
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