I don't disagree that they often make money via cost-plus contracts, that SLS is mainly a jobs program, or any of that. What I disagree with is your apparent inherent assumption that it's malicious. Nobody's "milking" anything - Hanlon's razor, remember. Never assume malice when stupidity (I'd prefer "incompetence") is an adequate explanation. The project managers at ULA, at Boeing, at Lockheed, at Northrop, aren't monsters trying to squeeze more money from the taxpayer. They, quite simply, believe that this is the way you have to build a rocket and you can't possibly do it any cheaper. They do pride themselves on being able to deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget, except they can't because everybody expects projects to be behind schedule and over budget, since that's the way it's always gone. Traditional expectations have a stranglehold on the oldspace industry. I've also worked for a newspace company - there was none of that attitude.
Don't assume the astronautics primes are evil. They're just... old.
> "We had released a series of papers showing how a depot/refueling architecture would enable a human exploration program using existing (at the time) commercial rockets," Sowers tweeted on Wednesday. "Boeing became furious and tried to get me fired. Kudos to my CEO for protecting me. But we were banned from even saying the 'd' word out loud. Sad part is that ULA did a lot of pathfinding work in that area and could have owned the refueling/depot market, enriching Boeing (and Lockheed) in the process. But it was shut down because it threatened SLS."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/rocket-scientist-say...
Even if the majority of employees are just there to work on the future of rocketry, if the incentives all reward the companies for being as overbudget and underperforming as possible, they are going to respond by being overbudget and underperforming.
An engineer in any one of them who presented a way to make the rocket cheaper to his boss would have been fired for not understanding how the company makes money.
The oversight is supposed to be done by congress, but they are extremely happy to provide good paying jobs in their districts, for decades.
No one even really hides it anymore. Any official, when asked about something like SLS and costs, would answer with "But NASA is going to the moon! Don't you want America to go to the moon?!" and with "tens of thousands of high paying jobs in all 50 states". There is no attempt to say the rising year over year price of orbital launch (before SpaceX), the exorbitant price of SLS + Orion, the use of solid boosters for crewed launches, etc, make any sense except to support the existing contractors to the detriment of the tax payer and space exploration.
See a NASA insider explaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3gzwMJWa5w&t=463s
(Or see anything by Dr. Robert Zubrin, or see the story of how the shuttle derived design that lost to RAC-2 (a Saturn V like design) was chosen to be "SLS": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNZx208bw0g&t=1970s)