Re:Starship Prototype Unveiled
by mobilefriendly on Monday September 30, 2019 @04:22AM
(#21112838)
Indeed, the space shuttle was so expensive it burned up much of the rest of NASAs budget-- keeping that disastrous, failed program running is why NASA doesn't have manned spaceflight capability at the moment.
Well, from an outsider perspective, the SLS/Orion program is pure pork. Nobody holding the purse strings cares whether the thing ever flies. Heck, probably they even prefer if it never flies (always just a few years and tens of billions in the future); a failed launch is potentially politically catastrophic.
Not just the time but the cost, if you take the figure of how much the space shuttle program cost, and divide it by total number of flights (including the two lethal ones), it cost somewhere between $900 million to $1.1bn every time the thing launched. It was very far from the early 1970s dream of an economically reusable spacecraft.