It’s high time for the US to ditch their white elephant, the SLS, and get serious about space again. The new space race has already begun. The only real prospect for the US is the Starship program but that’s run by a crazy narcissist with dubious loyalties. Time to stop coasting and to take control again.
Way too expensive, to the tune of over a billion per mission. Not innovative and yet they can’t even get their ancient technology to work. Not reusable, like they take old Shuttle engines that have flown multiple times and then just expend them. Such a waste. The whole thing is just a boondoggle that serves no purpose other than letting politicians hand out government pork to their local constituencies.
While it’s expensive, it’s only too expensive if someone else does the same cheaper. In terms of payload mass the only competition is Starship. Starship is still in development and has no successful launches, while SLS has 100% success rate with one launch. So if you want your heavy stuff, or people even, to get into space safely you better hand over the money to NASA.
NASA had several options to develop smaller rockets with orbital refuelling. Which is the way forward according to just about every expert. There was one senator, I forget the name, who explicitly blocked research into that just so he could keep his pork barrels. The whole thing is riddled with cost overruns and piss-poor project management (launch tower, anyone?) This is of course mainly due to political meddling but overall this whole program has been a disaster.
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