[credit_guy]

SLS is actually very affordable if seen from the correct angle: a know-how preservation program. After the end of the Cold War, the US reduced drastically its military expenditure. The danger was that some day will come (like, you know, the 2020's) when the US will need to restart the missile assembly lines. How do you keep enough people trained at an affordable cost? Well, you keep them busy building a rocket that never launches. Any single launch is money down the drain. You still need to launch, because if you don't you are in danger of fooling yourself: you think you maintained a qualified workforce, but actually they are all impostors. But other than quality assurance, the launches themselves are not important, they are just a cost. So you want to launch as few times as possible.

[samhuk]

Interesting, this was almost word-for-word how I was explaining it to a non-space-nerd friend of mine.

I'm still convinced that this theory, in a sort of occams razor way, is the most likely to be true.

If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?

To me, it seems clear that it is just a knowledge preservation program; a way to keep STEM, rocket science and engineering in America, in-house.

I'm currently based in the UK, and lord knows how messed up our manufacturing sector is today because it got all exported to the rest of the world, because the government didn't inveat and ensure that we maintained a sizable manufacturing worker force. US is just doind what every other government is trying to do nowadays - keep valauble (military, industrial, etc.) skills in-house.

[credit_guy]

> If SLS was just "a jobs program", then what is the government's motivation for "a jobs program"? It keeps unemployment lower? Is that true though? If the SLS didn't exist, the engineers would just move on...no?

One still can see it as a "jobs program" from the individual states' point of view. From the NASA link [1], I found out that the prime contractor is in Huntsville, Alabama, and important subcontractors are in New Orleans, LA, and in Northern Utah. Highly trained engineers would certainly find jobs somewhere, but maybe not in the same states, and that would be a hit to the local economy.

So, I can see how some senators and representatives from those states could put pressure for a make-work program to continue without regards for costs and results. But still, the Congress has lots of other members, and there is a pretty good chance that those other members did not mount a strong opposition because they saw the defense implications of keeping the SLS alive.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/fs/sls.html

[jessriedel]

To my knowledge, the SLS program isn't preserving any appreciable amount of ICBM know-how. They are essentially non-overlapping technologies. The explanation that SLS is a jobs program seems to fit the evidence much better.

[jjk166]

This doesn't match the data. First, the development of SLS began in 2011, two decades after the missile production had stopped. Second, SLS is designed around the use of shuttle era components which not only are very different from what would be used in missiles, but also specifically reduce the amount of practice that the next generation of engineers can get on developing these systems. Third, the actual rocket and the launches are a miniscule part of the program budget not launching doesn't save much money. Finally, the source of the high price tag is delays and reworks that would be wholly unnecessary if the goal were never to produce a working vehicle and which do not contribute to knowledge retention at all.

Basically, if this is a know-how preservation program, it is horribly mismanaged. And there's no reason why you couldn't have a know-how preservation program that also produced useful results. As with so many things, they're not playing 5D chess, they're just playing poorly.

[tim333]

Missile assembly lines are still there. The HIMARS ammo plant is going full out. Minuteman and Trident are still things, indeed in the UK we ordered some not long ago. There's also moon landing type tech at SpaceX and some other startups are working on interesting stuff - Stoke Space is quite an interesting one.