Yes, a huge portion of the money was down the drain because of the significant waste. It enabled bloated, inefficient companies to stay alive supporting this one massive project.

SLS could have been done differently. Instead it was loaded with political favors demanding specific parts/suppliers.

We can only know what was a dead end, waste or bloat in a complex systems pathways in retrospect. I would prefer for humanity's sake to see more avenues of technological advancement pursued rather then only those conforming to some(one's) definition of efficient/correct. SpaceX might be construed to be blowing private investment in some guy's grand vision of space exploration that might turn out to be simply vain. Time will tell. Deriding people exploring the edge of human progress because they don't fit with your values is presumptuous.

Cost and value are different things.

Someone's cost is another's value. Money didn't get burned. It moved along in the economy. It moving in ways you disapprove of is no basis to call it wrong. Unless you wanna parse the whole economy and veto things you don't agree with. Let me know how that turns out.

The government can only spend so much money without things breaking down. When some of that money goes to bloat, that is waste. Despite it still being in the economy. And it's not about some kind of personal approval factor. If the government pays 2x what it could have paid for the same level of quality, that's entirely objective.

If you're being objective with numerical measurements, care to provide source?

Bloat = waste, that is just circular logic. You're defining what you want to call waste as a synonym of waste. Nasa gets a budget and spend it on space missions, propulsion technology and launch vehicles. That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc. Not the rocket that fits your definition of efficiency. Having more then one actively used propulsion vehicle with different technological approaches is a national investment in resilience.

Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.

I do not have a source for the generic example number.

If you want sources for government spending too much on things, those exist all over.

> Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.

No, that's not what people are saying. The problem is that the main companies NASA contracts to are running in an extremely inefficient way and they get paid more when they waste money.

This is a problem that would exist even if SpaceX never became a company.

> That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc.

The problem is the dollars that aren't going to engineering and R&D.

Dollars that just stimulate the economy are bloat when they're going to some big company out of a budget that's supposed to be doing things like exploring space. If you want to just send out dollars to stimulate the economy, send them out to people with low incomes and they'll have a much bigger impact.

So you're just inventing numbers and making baseless claims? Got it. Stop wasting my time

I think it was abundantly clear that "If the government pays 2x" was a generic hypothetical number.

Thank you for ignoring 95% of my post with that useless rejection.