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The challenge I have with getting upset about SpaceX and Tesla's contracts is that, compared to where the money has been shunted otherwise, they seem like great fucking deals.
If the dollar amount and lack of delivery got anywhere close to "Business as Usual" at NASA or the EPA with the legacy MIC contractors and environmental grifters, then I would be upset.
Everyone's seen tweets summarizing the reality of the situation. NASA is pouring $2.7b (originally $383m, lol) into a far-less capable launch system than what SpaceX just proved is feasible, and spending hundreds of millions more on DEI grift, or bragging about the first PoC and Woman on the moon.
Funnily enough, there are plenty of MtF transgender people working for SpaceX and Tesla. They just want to actually accomplish something.
Whoa, whoa. That $2.7B isn't what's being poured into the launch system, it's what's being poured into the launch tower. The money that's gone into SLS is more than ten times that (or a touch less if you don't adjust for inflation; development started in 2011).
To be fair, the Mobile Launcher 2 tower is indeed mobile, and its Ground Support Equipment includes plumbing for liquid hydrogen, a cryogenic that makes even other cryogenics look easy.
To be snarky, ML2 doesn't even have any giant robot arms.
That is … why? Couldn’t they have built a mobile transport, maybe with a simplified support pillar so the rocket can’t topple over, and then at the flame trench a launch tower as a static structure? That would have simplified the requirements for both.
I'd assume they worry about the difficulty of either transferring the rocket from one platform to another as a whole and/or robustly (re)assembling the rocket on the static launch platform.
Fun fact: each of the two 5-segment SRBs on an SLS stack weighs twice as much as the entire dry mass of the Starship stack put together. A liquid rocket stage can be stacked while empty to make it light enough to lift easily, but with a solid rocket stage the only way you can empty it is with the on switch (and you can't refuel it so much as you can remanufacture it, and there is no off switch...).
Surely they assemble the SRB segments in-place, but yeah it's still quite heavy. They work well for what they do, but I do question their use for crewed flights generally.
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