Space
News and findings about our cosmos.
Subcommunity of Science
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Meanwhile:
"As of 10 March 2023 the fiscal year 2024 (FY2024) presidential budget request was $842 billion."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
Killing people is always affordable
It's so frustrating how expensive this thing is.
I get that SLS and Orion have insane congressional approval. And keep getting overfunded because of it. And a lot of that money would go away without them. And there's a lot of interesting development in HLS and CLPS that wouldn't exist without them. But it still just stinks to see how expensive SLS is and that there's basically nothing that can or will be done about it.
But will that mean the ignore the sunk cost fallacy and ditch the program?
Who am I kidding, of course not. Actually launching shit was never the goal of the program in the first place.
It's just maddening. The money could go to so many better things, but it has to get funneled to the same bloated old Shuttle contractors.
It's called the Senate Launch System for a reason. Many components are built in strategic states to ensure support from key senators.
the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent,
lmao. what a joke.
Why?
The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.
Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn't tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu'uh (see the articles cost reduction "objectives").
The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.
However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don't count.
Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.
they're wasting money like nobody's business.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission.
"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.
The report also cites concerns about development costs of future hardware for NASA's big-ticket rocket program, including the Exploration Upper Stage.
"Some NASA officials told us that changes to Artemis mission dates should not affect the SLS program’s cost estimate," the report states.
"Other officials noted that the program’s cost estimate would be expected to increase to account for the delay to the Artemis IV mission, which shifted from 2026 to 2028."
Saved 78% of original text.