"Greg \(Strider\) Moore" wrote on Tue,
27 Mar 2018 20:04:37 -0400:

"Jeff Findley" wrote in message
...

In article ,
says...

NASA chief explains why agency won?t buy a bunch of Falcon Heavy rockets:

"By some estimates, NASA could afford 17 to 27 Falcon Heavy launches a
year for
what it is paying annually to develop the SLS rocket, which won't fly
before
2020. Even President Trump has mused about the high costs of NASA's
rocket.

On Monday, during a committee meeting of NASA's Advisory Council, former
Space
Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale raised this issue. Following a
presentation
by Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of human spaceflight for NASA, Hale asked
whether
the space agency wouldn't be better off going with the cheaper commercial
rocket.

"Now that the Falcon Heavy has flown and been demonstrated, the
advertised cost
for that is quite low," Hale said. "So there are a lot of folks who ask
why
don't we just buy four or five or six of those and do what we need to do
without
building this big, heavy rocket and assemble things like we did with the
space
station?""

See:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018...heavy-rockets/

This question has been asked by people like me for years, well before
Falcon Heavy first flew. But now that it has flown successfully, it's
spurring others, much higher up, to ask the same question. The answers
supporting SLS, quite frankly, are unconvincing.

The lost opportunity cost is staggering.


Yeah. I'm confident that SLS may fly once... but after that... it's going to
be damn hard to justify flying it again.


I don't think they'll have a problem justifying it at all. SLS Block
1B handily exceeds everything else in payload. I think they'll wind
up flying the missions to build the Gateway with it, probably in part
by deliberately sizing the pieces so that only SLS Block 1B or bigger
can launch them and then complaining about incompatible cargo
interface requirements for everything but SLS.

NASA is more in the business of ****ing away money than exploring
space these days. On that note, the Webb telescope has slipped
another year (which will probably lead to the total cost breaking
ceilings mandated by Congress). That means everything behind it ALSO
slides, since funding isn't becoming available from the Webb telescope
program to fund the next big scope.


--
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
-- Charles Pinckney