Comment by panick21

> By your own data, Apollo had 65% more money than SLS/Orion.

I would say by my own data Apollo has to do 800% more work given the point on where it started.

> My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.

This isn't true. The Apollo program had many more objectives and was continuing and was about to do many more things. The politics around it just changed.

If it was a single goal, then they could have stopped after Apollo 11.

And of course after moon landings stopped, Skylab and other post-Apollo programs continued. Much of the Apollo hardware continued to operate for quite a while longer.

> SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.

Yeah but those changes in plan don't actually change the hardware of the rocket itself. Its always the exact same rocket. It just gets new mission that are designed to work for it, not the other way around. So you can't really say SLS/Orion was delayed because of chaining requirements.

> So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that.

The very fact that the requirements are fuzzy and the political process is a shit-show that gets nothing done and provides bad intensive is exactly the civilization level failure. Just as much as when you try to land on the moon or build a high speed rail line.

> BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.

NASA and government is pretty good on this and lots of people have done work on this, specially Casey at the Planetary Society. So I do not deserve all that much credit.

And for SLS I have been following the program for 10+ years and have been arguing since 2015 that the only rational plan is canceling it. But the congressional alliance behind it is just incredible.