Jim Bridenstine sounds like a competent guy, but the fact is that NASA as an organization is no longer competent. They can't build rockets anymore. SLS has been a complete failure. The program was announced in 2011. The plan was to make an expendable vehicle based on existing RS-25 engines, existing SRBs, and the existing Space Shuttle external tank. This idea of reusing all of these systems was based on the previous Constellation project. Over the past decade NASA has spent $15 billion on SLS and they have yet to launch. Falcon Heavy went from a concept in 2011 to launching Elon Musk's car into interplanetary space in 2018. The development cost for Falcon Heavy was around $500 million. That is 30x cheaper and almost twice as fast.

Orion has also been in development for over a decade and has cost $16 billion. Current estimates put the total development cost at $23 billion.

If you add up the development costs of Constellation, SLS, and Orion, I am sure it would be close to $50 billion. That's for an expendable launch system that costs $1 billion per launch. For the price of a single SLS launch, you could develop Falcon Heavy and launch 5 of them. Obviously Falcon Heavy doesn't have all the capabilities of SLS, but SLS is vaporware. And by the time SLS is working it will have to compete with Starship. It seems totally insane to continue this program considering that in the best case, we will have a launch system that is 10x more expensive than its competitor.

I am not going to dispute the idea that NASA, just like any government enterprise, isn’t as efficient as private enterprise. Just look at what happened with CDC COVID-19 tests as a data point from another domain.

That said, having experience working both with SpaceX and NASA, I can tell you that companies like SpaceX would not exist without NASA’s research and experience. The simplest example of this that comes to mind, again, having worked with both, is NASA’s decades-long work in materials science for space. The cost of acquisition for such knowledge is absolutely incalculable —some of it measured in lives.

The real cost and development timeline of a FH would be dramatically higher and longer without NASA.

A fair question, then, might be: Why can’t NASA use this knowledge to develop products as efficiently as SpaceX then?

In order to answer this question you would have to have access to documentation spanning at least from MCR to CDR in order to understand what we are comparing against. A rocket isn’t just a tube full of fuel and LOX.

I am not defending anyone, just highlighting context I am privy to within the limits of what I can disclose. I can say we are working on a small portion of the Artemis Mission.

Firstly, this money is a pittance compared to the costs of development of F-22, which produced a habdfull of planes and thats it.

Second, the decision to use existing shuttle conoonebts was made basically by congress/ lobbyists. Congress gets insane amount of control over nasa, and can fund or de- fund individual projects. As a result, nasa has to tailor them to something congress will like and approve. This miopic managenent probably results in what weve got

A) Whataboutism B) The program cost for the F-22 was 67B. It produced more than "a habdfull of planes", it produced 187. The reason it ended up costing so much (per aircraft) is the development cost had to be spread across fewer airframes than planned. Truncating the purchase to 187 is perhaps one of the greatest military acquisition mistakes in my lifetime.

This should be the top comment, and that video interview from NASA should be mandatory to watch before commenting in this thread.

I had little hope for Bridenstine when he got the position, but I must say that I've been impressed time and again. That video was absolutely terrific.