For the price NASA just agreed to pay to restart production of the RS-25 engine for SLS they could have prepaid for 16 separate Falcon Heavy launches. FH has a lift capacity 80% of SLS and is ready now.

NASA recently (actually 2016, my bad) agreed to pay Aerojet Rocketdyne $1.5B to restart construction of the Space Shuttle's RS-25 engine. Keep in mind NASA already has 16 brand new RS-25s left over from the Space Shuttles (15 left over, 1 built from spare parts) which is enough to outfit 4 SLS launches.

This is just another example of a huge waste of money by NASA. SLS has no vision or purpose. It won't fly until 2020 at the earliest probably more like 2021 or 2022 of the current trend continues (when was the last time a NASA funded project delivered something early? Haha). They already have engines for 4 launches of this thing and now they're spending billions more to build more engines that are 30+ years out of date anyway.

Meanwhile, that same amount could have bought 16 Falcon Heavy launches, a rocket that can fly right now and is reusable. This doesn't even consider that BFR is on schedule for it's firs launch in 2019 and is also totally reusable. The Raptor engine is light-years ahead of the RS-25. It's completely absurd for NASA to still be building ancient engines when there are obviously better alternatives available.

It angers me to see NASA wasting it's budget like this. I don't know how I can continue to advocate for increased funding for NASA when they piss money away like this.

Submitted August 02, 2018 at 10:43AM by shady1397 https://ift.tt/2n4J3X7