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Originally Posted by Donger
be able to deliver some 70 tons to low-earth orbit, or less than 20 tons to Mars, while costing around $150 million per mission. According to Musk, the rocket cost somewhere north of $500 million to develop.
Then look at the Space Launch System (SLS) being built under NASA’s instruction by Boeing, also to explore the solar system. According to the new NASA budget released last week, it will fly for the first time in 2020, capable of carrying some 77 tons to low earth orbit at a cost of about $1 billion a flight.
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I don't think SLS is quite dead, but it's got some major issues moving forward. It's pretty clear at this point that there's just too much bureaucracy involved at NASA to be competitive with commercial launchers. Once there's another heavy lift vehicle out there (New Glenn most likely), SLS is gonna be pretty damn useless.
This article lays it all out in (almost nauseating) detail.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018...eavy-launches/
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For the sake of argument, consider the costs of this three-year delay against the lift capability NASA could have bought by purchasing Falcon Heavy rockets from SpaceX in 2018, 2019, and 2020. That $7.8 billion equates to 86 launches of the reusable Falcon Heavy or 52 of the expendable version. This provides up to 3,000 tons of lift—the equivalent of eight International Space Stations or one heck of a Moon base. Obviously NASA does not need that many launches, but it could buy several Falcon Heavy rockets a year and have the funds to build meaningful payloads to launch on them.
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