Wow, what a pathetic ending to America’s space ambitions to have its 20+ year struggle to return to the moon quashed at the same time it has to decommission its major space station without a clear replacement. If SLS is canceled, then the Lunar Gateway program is even more pointless than it was before.

(Insert usual caveat about how my positive comments about SpaceX are solely for the scientists/technicians/engineers who do the real work there, and not the shithead owner.)

Good riddance if true! (And not to toot my own horn, but called it in the update!) Fuck this wretched overpriced slow-to-build disposable relic using proven-crew-killing solid-fuel boosters. Maybe all those beautiful RS-25 engines that powered the space shuttle can find places back in museums instead of being dumped on the floor of the Atlantic ocean.

According to an August report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), even just the price of the tower designed to launch rockets starting with Artemis IV, which is tentatively scheduled for 2028, has ballooned to a whopping $1.8 billion.

That is related to this. The prime contractor for a new mobile launch tower, Bechtel, fucked everything up. And to put the cost in perspective, NASA paid SpaceX $2.6 billion for the R&D, construction, and operation of 6 Crew Dragon flights to the ISS. (They’ve since had additional mission contracts awarded to replace the Starliner missions that Boeing can’t do.) For less than 50% more than a cost-plus wrongly-constructed launch tower that’s still not nearly ready, NASA got an entire fixed-price crewed space program that has never had an in-flight failure.

Also to clarify, it’s only NASA’s rocket in the sense of who owns and operates it. SLS’s prime contractor is Boeing, and has among its major subcontractors Aerojet Rocketdyne (a subsidiary of L3Harris) and Northrop Grumman. The Orion crew vehicle that’s intended to be it’s normal Moon-bound cargo is built by Lockheed-Martin. Both SLS and Orion are being built under “cost-plus” terms, which means that delays and cost overruns are NASA’s to pay no matter who’s really at fault. You can thank the US senate for that arrangement.