[cletus]

SLS is a jobs program. It's not economically viable at over $1 billion per launch.

As for Blue Origin and New Glenn, this is an object lesson that simply throwing money at the problem doesn't necessarily solve it. Did you know Blue Origin was founded ~18 months before SpaceX?

For the longest time (up until ~9 months ago), Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice. You see, this guy seems to embody everything wrong with corporate America: he was completely focused on not failing rather than succeeding. So there were constant delays with New Glenn and the BE-4 engine, which is years behind schedule. You can't fail if you don't launch.

And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

It's a total waste of taxpayer money and an extension of the pork of the military/government-aerospace/industrial complex. And they're still using Russian-made rocket engines on Atlas V prior to switching to Vulcan Centaur, another expensive platform. The American taxpayer deserves to have billions in waste cut out and capital used more efficiently at SpaceX and other vendors where there is value/$.

[deepsun]

Yet that was historically the most successful approach in XX century for most of research-intensive industries (space, transistors, energy etc) -- when government spends crazy amounts of taxpayers money for some programs that bring little $$ back, but sprawl a lot of commercial startup follow-ups.

Investing in commercial approaches as the step 1 doesn't seem to work in multi-billion R&D endeavors.

So yes, it's not fair, but turns out to be better for the country down the road.

[robertlagrant]

That works for a bit, and then all the others jostle in and start feeding on the pork. SpaceX will get this eventually too if it does well enough and settles into a routine of project bids, project management, technical project success, and more bids.

[deepsun]

"All others" you mean commercial companies? That's the goal, yes.

"Jostle" you mean competition? That's the idea, right.

So -- awesome.

[robertlagrant]

"All the others" being the people who don't work like that, but want pork.

[lupusreal]

Cost-plus contracts work during wartime when everybody is motivated by the war to get the job done fast, to end the war and get their friends and family back home safely as soon as possible.

During peace time, the predominant motive is to maximize profit by dragging out the work.

[panick21_]

SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch. They hope to get it to $2 billion $ eventually but that will take a while. 1 billion $ is the end goal that they use in marketing, but that's not happening anytime this or next decade.

[nordsieck]

> SLS cost way, way more then $1 billion per launch. More like 4 billion $ per launch.

So, the full stack of SLS costs $4.1B. But that includes the cost of Orion which is ~$1.3B when you include the European Service Module, and it includes the cost of 1 year's worth of ground support equipment including upkeep for various buildings like the VAB, etc.

The marginal cost of a cargo SLS (should one ever launch, which is looking increasingly unlikely) is a bit over $2B. Which is still a horrifically high price.

For people who don't know much about SLS, one way to put its cost into context is, every time the full stack with Orion launches, that's about 1/6th of NASA's yearly budget. And that doesn't count any development cost which is several tens of Billions.

[panick21_]

I'm not sure that's true. I would bet with Orion its even more. It depends what you consider to be work before launch 1 as launch cost. And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS.

You can of course get higher if you add development cost as well. But that depends on how many launches there are.

[nordsieck]

> I'm not sure that's true.

From the OIG report[1]:

> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.47 Building and launching one Orion capsule costs approximately $1 billion, with an additional $300 million for the Service Module supplied by the ESA through a barter agreement in exchange for ESA’s responsibility for ISS common system operating costs, transportation costs to the ISS, and other ISS supporting services. In addition, we estimate the single-use SLS will cost $2.2 billion to produce, including two rocket stages, two solid rocket boosters, four RS-25 engines, and two stage adapters. Ground systems located at Kennedy where the launches will take place—the Vehicle Assembly Building, Crawler-Transporter, Mobile Launcher 1, Launch Pad, and Launch Control Center—are estimated to cost $568 million per year due to the large support structure that must be maintained. The $4.1 billion total cost represents production of the rocket and the operations needed to launch the SLS/Orion system including materials, labor, facilities, and overhead, but does not include any money spent either on prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile Launcher 2.

> And we don't really yet know the cost of the EUS.

We have an idea of an initial cost estimate from this[2].

NASA agreed to buy 2 core stages and 2 EUSes for $3.2B. Since RS-25s are around $100M each and the SRBs are around $200M each, this pushes the cost of the rocket up to $2.4B, maybe a bit more.

---

1. https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-22-003.pd...

2. https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/nasa-commits-to-future-...

[panick21_]

> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.

Yeah but you see, they will miss that 'one mission per year' thing by quite a large margin. And it will be more expensive because of that alone.

There are other traps in these numbers. OIG numbers are far better then NASA but I bet in 20-30 years when somebody does the total cost it will be higher.

> prior development of the system or for next-generation technologies such as the SLS’s Exploration Upper Stage, Orion’s docking system, or Mobile Launcher 2.

And I don't think just excluding all 'prior development' as if it was irrelevant makes much sense. Development cost should be considered as part of a program.

[nordsieck]

> Yeah but you see, they will miss that 'one mission per year' thing by quite a large margin.

So, that's fair. But it's also complicated. Part of that number (for EGS) is for the upkeep of buildings like the VAB. Which is fair - SLS is the only real user, so they get charged for it.

But it's also kind of not fair, since NASA's going to keep it around, even if SLS wasn't a thing. As evidenced by NASA doing just that in the interim period between Constellation and SLS.

> And I don't think just excluding all 'prior development' as if it was irrelevant makes much sense. Development cost should be considered as part of a program.

I completely agree with you in general.

But I think that it's easier to tally the development costs separately.

And it's important to know how much it costs to just build and launch the rocket. A number which NASA (outside of OIG) has been extremely reluctant to release to the public. As far as I know, NASA leadership has never made specific claims about how much SLS costs, just that the OIG numbers are wrong and/or misleading.

Once the program ends, we'll have a better idea of how to amortize the develop costs over the total number of launches.

[dylan604]

> You can't fail if you don't launch

There's a phrase "failure to launch" that would imply the opposite sentiment

[jasongill]

I believe that the parent commenter means "you can't fail if you don't try"

[dylan604]

If you're too risk adverse to even try, then just sit down and get out of the way. I want to put the shut up part of that quote in there too as in quit fighting for contracts/bids that could go to people that aren't afraid.

You can't fail if you don't try, but you can't succeed either.

[dyauspitr]

Oooh the founding before spacex is a huge surprise. I always assumed it was bezos trying to keep up with the joneses with musk.

[johng]

Whatever happened to armadillo aerospace?

[mikepurvis]

Excessive hubris around solving hardware problems in software, they blew up their rocket and ran out of money as Carmack couldn’t justify it any longer: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/82qkvl/john_carmack_...

[modeless]

I think it's just more that Carmack didn't want to go all in with his entire life and net worth the way Elon did (and without which SpaceX would certainly have died exactly the same death). And who can blame him?

[WalterBright]

Musk went all in with Tesla, too. At one point he was down to about $200,000 and was a few hours from bankruptcy of Tesla and himself.

Musk is an enormous risk taker.

[SEJeff]

It was a month, not a few hours, and I have no idea where you got the $200,000 number. That is certainly not what Elon himself said. He said 1 month.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1323640901248393217

[modeless]

The reason you have no idea is you're talking about different instances of near bankruptcy for Tesla. Which tends to support GP's point.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

It's probably no coincidence that Bill Gates was also. Bet the farm 2-3x at least.

[sillysaurusx]

Would you mind providing a source?

[WalterBright]

"The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day."

"Elon Musk" by Ashlee Vance, pg 210

[sneak]

It’s easy to take risks if the failure condition is “still a multimillionaire”.

I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places. I know several people with NW of <$50M who have stashed 2-4% of their assets away in this fashion.

World wars happen, governments collapse, favor shifts, etc. Why wouldn’t you have a backup plan when it’s just pennies?

I refuse to believe that he was ever at risk of having less than 5-10M in pocket money left over after everything implodes.

[nordsieck]

> I refuse to think any sufficiently clever billionaire doesn’t have $1-10M in gold buried in a couple geographically distributed places.

Maybe you don't remember this, but Elon wasn't a Billionaire with his exit from Paypal. He made his bones with Tesla/SpaceX (honestly, mostly Tesla, but we'll see how SpaceX turns out, it could be bigger in the end).

[Tade0]

Why bother when you can just have real estate instead?

I'm likely missing something here, but to me this minimises the problem to just a reduction in the number of properties you can move into (assuming some are lost and some of the others sold).

[rlt]

I’m not a billionaire (technically neither was Elon at the time but that’s besides the point, but I suspect human psychology leads to a non-linear relationship between net work and acceptance of risk. Most billionaires don’t want to become mere millionaires. And people in poverty would likely say it’s easy for someone in the middle class to take risks.

[throwaway2037]

Wiki says:

    > In August 2013, Carmack indicated that following the crash of the STIG-B rocket earlier that year, he had wound down the company operations and had put the company in "hibernation mode."

    > In 2015, the assets of Armadillo Aerospace were sold to EXOS Aerospace Systems & Technologies, Inc.

[mr_toad]

> You can't fail if you don't launch.

The BE-4 was launched earlier this year. I wouldn’t assume that late means never.

[blkhawk]

the BE-4 is an engine - it was finally used in a rocket january yes - after being in development for almost 15 years. That us still kinda slow compared to spacex.

[imtringued]

New Glenn was announced in 2016. An 8 year long development process is hardly slow in aerospace. The development costs are also somewhere between three and four billion dollars. The real problem with Blue Origin is that Jeff didn't really give a damn about Blue Origin and let himself get scammed out of his money.

[panick21_]

Given how many people work at Blue, I would suggest its more then four billion $. The Ariane 6 cost 5 billion $ or more. BlueOrigin has been spending almost 2 billion $ a year.

[starik36]

True about founding before SpaceX. But wasn't it just a think tank for a while?

[bboygravity]

How does that make it better? :p

[Maxatar]

In many ways it still is just a think tank.

[aksss]

It's also a hedge against SpaceX imploding/compromise/whatever. In that role, cost is less important than having a provably functional product. I'm not saying anything is likely to happen to SpaceX, just saying that having SpaceX as a SPOF in the US space program would not be the best strategy.

[lupusreal]

Starliner is that hedge, SLS isn't. Using SLS for delivery to the ISS would be a crime against tax payers.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Such a sad take though, SpaceX is probably filled with America loving people not matter what a PR firms bot spew online about musk

[jvanderbot]

Any sufficiently large acquisition is indistinguishable from a jobs program.

[dubcanada]

You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company, and a good CEO also needs to have industry experience.

I don't know if either of those are actually true, there are plenty of good CEOs who came from zero experience in the industry. And plenty of bad CEOs who came from plenty of experience in the industry. Both of these run successful and not successful companies.

For example the currently Boeing CEO does not have experience in airplanes, came from a business background. And is considered a bad CEO by the average person (though considered a good CEO by stockholders, or at least was before the past few months).

[notatoad]

>You seem to assume a good CEO equals a successful company

the only assumption i see is the counter to that - a bad CEO equals an unsuccessful company. and i don't think that's a very controversial assumption.

[gibolt]

A bad CEO can look great on paper and in the stock price. The product however will likely not keep pace, charging more for a product providing less value.

Long term value, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction are all intertwined. New management is more likely than not to harm at least one of those 3 .

[dubcanada]

> And the new CEO (David Limp) used to be in charge of Kindles.

Seems to imply there is an issue with a CEO of a space company previously working on Kindles.

> Bezos had the former Honeywell CEO in charge of Blue Origin, which to me was such an odd choice

Also seems to imply the CEO is bad because their previously only worked at Honeywell on thermostats.

In my mind none of the above has anything to do with how good or bad a CEO is. Perhaps I am misreading it. In which case ignore me.

[bigjimmyk3]

Honeywell is also an aerospace company:

https://aerospace.honeywell.com/

[resolutebat]

All things being equal, you'd want a CEO who understands the business, either by coming up through the ranks or a long career at another company in the same business.

[AtlasBarfed]

Which is basically Gwynne Shotwell, if I read her bio correctly.

[cletus]

I reject the notion that a good manager can manage anything.

I also reject the financialization of modern companies where we put accountants in charge who aren't subject-matter experts whose only playbook is to cut costs and jack up prices.

It's exactly what's wrong with Boeing today.

Obligatory Steve Jobs quotes on "idea people" [1] and Xerox [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdplq4cj76I

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM&t=2s