NASA has, in many ways, become a victim of its own success. It should not be surprising that this is where we are after 12 years. The government will have to, at some point, recognize, “Hey, the public’s money could be better spent on technologies that are going to capitalize on reduced heavy-lift launch costs.” That should have been the goal all along. When you add to that SpaceX’s Starship, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, which have new reusable technologies-I don’t think we are going to see the SLS launch for 30 years, as we saw with the Space Shuttle. NASA hopes to be able to launch it once a year. And it can only launch every other year, at first. But now we’ve spent an additional $23 billion on the rocket, and another $20 billion on the Orion capsule. Yet here we are, 40 years later, using the same engines. Each year it launched seven or eight times, which was well short of its goal of launching 40 to 50 times. We flew the Space Shuttle for 30 years at a cost of $3 to $4 billion a year. But the incentives were never there for these types of programs to produce the vehicle on time or on budget. How can you be lying like this to NASA, the public, Congress?” They claimed they weren’t. I remember when Boeing first came to me and said they could do this for $6 billion. If people had been honest about how long it would take, and how expensive it would be, to get the SLS ready to launch next week, they would not have proposed it, either. NASA’s Space Launch System was proposed back in 2010. Should NASA have its own spaceship to compete with SpaceX and Blue Origin? One Question for Lori Garver, former deputy administrator of NASA (from 2009 to 2013) and author of Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age.
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