Brief, if almost 4-year-old article:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-t...

The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)

> The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.)

There is a much more official and up to date figure:

> We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year.

https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-22-003.pdf

From what I understand, that number does include ground systems.

For what it's worth, NASA leadership continues to contest this value, although they refuse to publicly give their own value.

To be fair to you, the $4.1B figure does not ignore development costs. I don't think there's an agreed upon way to include them, so everyone just mentions them separately. And they are quite... large.

And that's while reusing as many shuttle components as possible, including the motors and the SRBs.

Kind of sad that the last living pieces of the shuttle will be dropped into the ocean and left to rust away

> Kind of sad that the last living pieces of the shuttle will be dropped into the ocean and left to rust away

I know a lot of people want to get them into museums, but I suspect that every museum that really wants one already has one. And I'd suggest to you that it's much more dignified that they go out as part of a rocket launch than slowly decaying in a warehouse somewhere.

I overheard some high-temperature semiconductor guys ("how do you build chips that work on venus / in engine blades / etc") at a NASA facility talking about budgets in a way that suggested a substantial part of their funding came from the launch vehicle budget.

I don't have good intuition for how much of the bloat comes from a top-heavy organization, from grifting contractors, and from good old fashion boondoggles -- but I'd like to add to this pile of possibilities the possibility the categories are poorly drawn and that "things which NASA should be doing but shouldn't be classified under launch vehicles" are nevertheless classified under launch vehicles.

"High-temperature semiconductor" sounds like an xkcd panel.