Just cancel the damn thing and put it out of our misery.
[Update a while later]
From Bob Zimmerman: SpaceX versus NASA.
11 thoughts on “The OIG Audit On SLS”
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Just cancel the damn thing and put it out of our misery.
[Update a while later]
From Bob Zimmerman: SpaceX versus NASA.
Comments are closed.
Privatize. Let’s pardon Bernie Madoff, assign him as SLS program director and move the funding to the private sector.
After all, this would be the private sector model no?
“After all, this would be the private sector model no?”
No, it’s the crony fascist model.
The private sector model is “NASA takes bids for a service. NASA chooses one of the resulting bids. The winner gets what NASA offered to pay, with no cost plus incentives to drag out development”.
I should have stated all factors otherwise staying the same.
Cost plus made sense for Apollo. Everything was being done for the first time.
Cost plus made sense for the Shuttle. (Whether the Shuttle itself made sense is another story.)
Arguably, cost plus made sense for ISS, too.
But it makes no sense for procuring heavy lift launch service in the 2010’s. It made no sense in 2011; it makes even less sense in 2020.
The private sector model really starts with “now that NASA no longer exists…”
Only 57 pages, they left out more than they included. I said a while back that this was the perfect government program. The only thing that could endangers the gravy train would be actual progress. By continuing to spend a few billion a year, they prevent the waste of all the billions spent so far and the blame for ever starting this farce.
Even if SpaceX and other newspace companies did not exist, I’d still be in favor (as I have been from day 1) of canceling SLS.
It’s simply too expensive to be useful. Same thing with Orion (plus, Orion is far too heavy to be useful beyond LEO, and too big to be useful in LEO).
So, what will happen? I don’t foresee it SLS being canceled – too much vested pork. I also do not foresee it flying in June 2021, as currently claimed, even if the Green Run goes perfectly (and I suspect it won’t). It will slip, yet again. My prediction is that the next slip will be to November, 2021, because at least that’s in the same year – and then slip it a couple of months more to get it to 2022 without such a big slip. Then, go for shorter but more frequent schedule slips to get EM-1 to 2023, then 2024, assuming that nothing at all goes wrong.
Even if the SLS gets canceled next year and never flies, it will have fulfilled its primary function by funneling billions of dollars to the districts of powerful members of Congress. The biggest failure of cancellation will be that even more billions were not funneled to those districts. Always remember that politicians use different metrics when evaluating the success of a program than we mere taxpayers use. We think of things like efficiency, success rates, etc. They think of things like money spent in their districts, votes bought, campaign contributions received, and cronies/family members enriched.
I recall back when SLS was new, there was significant support from parties that were keen on big rockets. For example, around here there was Robert Zubrin and Mark Whittington.
That goodwill is gone. The only supporters left have a funding stake in SLS or a derivative project. Nobody else will touch it. They betrayed too many people over the years. I think SLS is going to die, though it probably has years of funding still in it.
I think that was before Zubrin realized that a Mars base could be started with just a few Red Dragons. He really doesn’t care how it’s done, only that it gets done.
Zubrin still cares, to some degree, how it’s done. He’s finally come around to seeing that SLS and NASA will never figure in human Mars missions so that is definitely progress. He’s a late convert to the Church of Elon, but he’s most of the way in now.
He’s still got some quibbles. He thinks Elon should build a much smaller Starship for the initial human Mars landings so that the first crew can clear/build landing sites for the full-size units. I don’t find his argument very compelling.
But the important thing is that Zubrin, after decades as a major NASA kibitzer, but still very much a NASA believer, is now an apostate to the Old Time NASA Religion of his earlier days.
For both Zubrin and Whittington, the Road to Damascus moment was the first launch of Falcon Heavy. Prior to that, neither of them seems to have taken SpaceX’s deep space ambitions seriously. After that, SpaceX suddenly had credibility, even anent something as seemingly outre as Starship and Super Heavy.