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by panick21_
1525 days ago
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True but you could with Starship. Or even if we ignore Starship. Falcon Heavy, Vulcan and New Glenn. The only reason SLS is required is because the mission architects HAD TO use SLS in their architecture. SLS in terms of what it does for it price would never be used in any architecture that tried to achieve the most with a given budget. |
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F9 Heavy can do a lot of good science missions, and many payload sizes are coming down. I'd personally include the Ariane stuff as well, James Webb launched on a Ariane 5 (around $200M per launch - so can get 20 launches on that or 10 launches + 10 new $200M science missions for one SLS).
This ignores the DEVELOPMENT cost of SLS which is mind bogglingly large as well as some of the ongoing just sustainment costs (also insane).