10 ms·

Except you look at what they are spending on the entire SLS infrastructure vs what they are getting (vs other science options and/or space exploration options)

Except you look at what they are spending on the entire SLS infrastructure vs what they are getting (vs other science options and/or space exploration options) and basically your mind is blown at how wasteful NASA is. SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.

FactolSarin 2y ago
I don't think NASA would have chosen the SLS platform though. It was basically mandated by Congress.
- _joel 2y ago
  [flagged]
- el_toast 2y ago
  Same story with shuttle and that's why it looks the way it is and was as expensive as it was. It would have been a completely different vehicle if Congress weren't meddling.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    Congress is the owner. Want a different management ideology? Get different management. NASA is wasteful, eh? Maybe that's because they have no incentive not to be wasteful..
    - eggy 2y ago
      NASA is neither a public or private company, but rather a government agency. Congress is an employee of the US taxpayer. I think that makes them more of a manager of NASA and we should hold Congress accountable.
    - margalabargala 2y ago
      The leadership and composition of Congress has changed numerous times over the years without change to management ideology. It does not seem likely that electing mildly different people will change the management ideology. Management acted in accordance with the incentives they were presented with. I can't say NASA seems particularly wasteful outside ways in which they are mandated to be so.
      - wkat4242 2y ago
        I think this is because local state concerns are so prevalent here. Political colour doesn't even matter, but getting the pork barrel for the state manufacturing locations is. This won't change no matter who you vote in. It's like hardwired into the system.
        margalabargala 2y ago
        Exactly. There's not actually much of an incentive for a congressperson to create something broadly positive for the US as a vague whole, like an independently-operating excellent space program. The incentive massively is instead in favor of that congressperson to have a space program that is meets some minimum bar of competence, and past that point do everything to benefit that congressperson's voting district such as mandate certain things be manufactured there, etc.
    - jlarocco 2y ago
      I think the point being made is that NASA is wasteful because the people in charge (Congress) told them to be wasteful.
      - xwolfi 2y ago
        You are in charge. Congress is your employee.
        daemoens 2y ago
        Except I can't do anything about Senator John Jones from Arizona who wants to keep the couple thousand jobs he brought to his constituency. He won't budge on it because non-Arizonans didn't vote for him.
        MichaelNolan 2y ago
        You’re probably thinking about the former senator of Alabama, Richard Shelby. There is no current or former senator by the name John Jones in Arizona. Additionally it is Alabama that benefits from the SLS program, not Arizona.
        jlarocco 2y ago
        Sure. It doesn't change anything, though. NASA's doing what they're told, and Congress is doing what we asked them to.
        freedomben 2y ago
        If that's true, then I'm officially notifying everyone in Congress and the Senate, they are terminated immediately and need to clear their offices by the end of the week. Let's see if it happens or not, and then we'll know whether you were correct or not.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    What NASA wanted was a space station, a small tug to move stuff in space, and a small shuttle to move people and cargo from earth to that station. The whole point of the space shuttle was to have it service the space station, but the station wasn't greenlit. Instead we got a much bigger shuttle that was useful as a military asset but was a money pit with terrible safety record. Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations).
    - lhoff 2y ago
      > Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations). It's the first time that I heard this theory. Do you have any sources to read up on it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
eggy 2y ago
I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing. I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby). I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid. I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society
- tempnow987 2y ago
  The issue here is a couple of things: - Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat. - The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations - NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System"). So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy! So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)! Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.
photochemsyn 2y ago
NASA's manned mission division does seem to have the bigger problem with bloated contracting budgets and inefficiency, relative to the rest of the organization. I'd guess that's due to direct political influence (the Richard Shelby - Bill Nelson effect in that case). From 2010: https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html
- tempnow987 2y ago
  Yep, the whole SpaceX thing was unpopular with Biden admin - I think they brought Bill Nelson back from retirement - he'd really fought for SLS and fought against "wasting" money on SpaceX. The Biden admin have some kind of beef with Elon. They also needed to get Kathy L out who had started to push down manned mission cost (crew dragon etc) and I think they succeeded there - there was a push to get her off new projects and into just operations I think to keep her from disrupting the pork - even just by showing the contrasts to other approaches.
akira2501 2y ago
> SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only. > The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars. What do you think this _should_ have cost?
- Analemma_ 2y ago
  NASA also thought the Space Shuttle was going to get cheaper per-launch after a couple years of service, and they turned out to be completely wrong. Why should we trust that this time will be different? NASA's own Inspector General says, "... NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic" and "... a single SLS will cost more than $2 billion through the first 10 SLS rockets ... " [0] [0]: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pd...
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > and they turned out to be completely wrong. There were a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong. The chief among them was launch cadence and satellite capture and return missions. When these assumptions changed the cost values changed significantly as well. > Why should we trust that this time will be different? Do you understand the details of this specific contract? It's limited to 10 launches. It's structured quite a bit differently than the shuttle program was. > NASA's own Inspector General says Yes and did you read the recommendations and follow up from that same report? Or is this just a "haha NASA is dumb" rant that's become common around here?
    - tempnow987 2y ago
      NASA is dumb. They are funding this thing (SLS) at cost+ - and despite paying for it don't own it! That is totally ridiculous. If I hire someone to build a website for me, at the end I own it. NASA has given away the rights to SLS. So they can only do a deal for SLS with current contractors. WHATEVER price those contractors want to charge, they can't let anyone else compete to build it. I also think there is almost no chance anyone of these folks is going to do fixed price for EUS or whatever. Contractors are getting something like $600 million / year on this thing and have been hoovering the gravy for 7-8 years. Remember that these types of forever contracts that take 20-30 years are also liked by the NASA centers who work with the contractors - it's very stable career / funding (ignore the waste). So NASA at the centers level is not fighting against this stuff (ie, it's not just congress that pushes this stuff). All these pork projects got a huge win with Biden picking Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Do wonder if a bit of SpaceX hate played a role there :)

FactolSarin 2y ago

I don't think NASA would have chosen the SLS platform though. It was basically mandated by Congress.

_joel 2y ago
[flagged]
el_toast 2y ago
Same story with shuttle and that's why it looks the way it is and was as expensive as it was. It would have been a completely different vehicle if Congress weren't meddling.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  Congress is the owner. Want a different management ideology? Get different management. NASA is wasteful, eh? Maybe that's because they have no incentive not to be wasteful..
  - eggy 2y ago
    NASA is neither a public or private company, but rather a government agency. Congress is an employee of the US taxpayer. I think that makes them more of a manager of NASA and we should hold Congress accountable.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    The leadership and composition of Congress has changed numerous times over the years without change to management ideology. It does not seem likely that electing mildly different people will change the management ideology. Management acted in accordance with the incentives they were presented with. I can't say NASA seems particularly wasteful outside ways in which they are mandated to be so.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      I think this is because local state concerns are so prevalent here. Political colour doesn't even matter, but getting the pork barrel for the state manufacturing locations is. This won't change no matter who you vote in. It's like hardwired into the system.
      - margalabargala 2y ago
        Exactly. There's not actually much of an incentive for a congressperson to create something broadly positive for the US as a vague whole, like an independently-operating excellent space program. The incentive massively is instead in favor of that congressperson to have a space program that is meets some minimum bar of competence, and past that point do everything to benefit that congressperson's voting district such as mandate certain things be manufactured there, etc.
  - jlarocco 2y ago
    I think the point being made is that NASA is wasteful because the people in charge (Congress) told them to be wasteful.
    - xwolfi 2y ago
      You are in charge. Congress is your employee.
      - daemoens 2y ago
        Except I can't do anything about Senator John Jones from Arizona who wants to keep the couple thousand jobs he brought to his constituency. He won't budge on it because non-Arizonans didn't vote for him.
        MichaelNolan 2y ago
        You’re probably thinking about the former senator of Alabama, Richard Shelby. There is no current or former senator by the name John Jones in Arizona. Additionally it is Alabama that benefits from the SLS program, not Arizona.
      - jlarocco 2y ago
        Sure. It doesn't change anything, though. NASA's doing what they're told, and Congress is doing what we asked them to.
      - freedomben 2y ago
        If that's true, then I'm officially notifying everyone in Congress and the Senate, they are terminated immediately and need to clear their offices by the end of the week. Let's see if it happens or not, and then we'll know whether you were correct or not.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  What NASA wanted was a space station, a small tug to move stuff in space, and a small shuttle to move people and cargo from earth to that station. The whole point of the space shuttle was to have it service the space station, but the station wasn't greenlit. Instead we got a much bigger shuttle that was useful as a military asset but was a money pit with terrible safety record. Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations).
  - lhoff 2y ago
    > Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations). It's the first time that I heard this theory. Do you have any sources to read up on it?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

eggy 2y ago

I think a matching industry company, but not necessarily a better counter example, would be SpaceX vs. NASA, for better or worse, and obvious reasons. They are trying to change the launch-and-trash model to reuse, so this requires a paradigm shift. When NASA chose SpaceX and Boeing to compete in 2014, SpaceX won, and after seeing Boeing's current fiasco decline, that's a good thing. I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby). I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid. I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

tempnow987 2y ago
The issue here is a couple of things: - Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat. - The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations - NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System"). So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy! So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)! Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.

photochemsyn 2y ago

NASA's manned mission division does seem to have the bigger problem with bloated contracting budgets and inefficiency, relative to the rest of the organization. I'd guess that's due to direct political influence (the Richard Shelby - Bill Nelson effect in that case). From 2010: https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html https://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62767_Page3.html

tempnow987 2y ago
Yep, the whole SpaceX thing was unpopular with Biden admin - I think they brought Bill Nelson back from retirement - he'd really fought for SLS and fought against "wasting" money on SpaceX. The Biden admin have some kind of beef with Elon. They also needed to get Kathy L out who had started to push down manned mission cost (crew dragon etc) and I think they succeeded there - there was a push to get her off new projects and into just operations I think to keep her from disrupting the pork - even just by showing the contrasts to other approaches.

akira2501 2y ago

> SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only. > The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars. What do you think this _should_ have cost?

Analemma_ 2y ago
NASA also thought the Space Shuttle was going to get cheaper per-launch after a couple years of service, and they turned out to be completely wrong. Why should we trust that this time will be different? NASA's own Inspector General says, "... NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic" and "... a single SLS will cost more than $2 billion through the first 10 SLS rockets ... " [0] [0]: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pd...
- akira2501 2y ago
  > and they turned out to be completely wrong. There were a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong. The chief among them was launch cadence and satellite capture and return missions. When these assumptions changed the cost values changed significantly as well. > Why should we trust that this time will be different? Do you understand the details of this specific contract? It's limited to 10 launches. It's structured quite a bit differently than the shuttle program was. > NASA's own Inspector General says Yes and did you read the recommendations and follow up from that same report? Or is this just a "haha NASA is dumb" rant that's become common around here?
  - tempnow987 2y ago
    NASA is dumb. They are funding this thing (SLS) at cost+ - and despite paying for it don't own it! That is totally ridiculous. If I hire someone to build a website for me, at the end I own it. NASA has given away the rights to SLS. So they can only do a deal for SLS with current contractors. WHATEVER price those contractors want to charge, they can't let anyone else compete to build it. I also think there is almost no chance anyone of these folks is going to do fixed price for EUS or whatever. Contractors are getting something like $600 million / year on this thing and have been hoovering the gravy for 7-8 years. Remember that these types of forever contracts that take 20-30 years are also liked by the NASA centers who work with the contractors - it's very stable career / funding (ignore the waste). So NASA at the centers level is not fighting against this stuff (ie, it's not just congress that pushes this stuff). All these pork projects got a huge win with Biden picking Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Do wonder if a bit of SpaceX hate played a role there :)