I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. And I'm contrasting this against SLS cost "projections", which invariably end up lowballing reality. I'm steel-manning the argument for the SLS as much as I can, but it's still just nonsensical.
The idea we need to compete against ourselves is something that came straight from Boeing after they lost their bid for commercial crew, leading to them to use their connections to Congress to force NASA to make an unprecedented decision to give bids to 2 different companies. SpaceX succeeded at commercial crew putting astronauts on the ISS in 2020. Boeing, by contrast, was allowed to skip parts of the testing phase (for Commercial Crew), failed others, and was still greenlit because of corruption. And that's precisely how you ended up with the two astronauts put on their first human launch stranded on the ISS for months, only to end up getting rescued by SpaceX.
It's a nonsensical argument - we didn't create two Apollo programs, because there's no justification. And in any case, Boeing is clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a "horse" for this race. Instead we get a 3-legged mule sold at 5-time Kentucky Derby winner thoroughbred prices.
>I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment.
You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.
In partial reuse mode, you get 57k kg from Falcon Heavy vs 95k kg from SLS, with the catch that you can launch 25 Falcon Heavies for the same cost as 1 SLS. And that's exclusively the recurring (and likely greatly low-balled) per-launch costs, ignoring the tens of billions of dollars that have (and are) being dumped into its development. In reality those also need to be aggregated into its cost per launch.
Orion's mass far exceeds Heavy's payload to TLI. It simply can't be used for the Artemis manned lunar program unless you want to completely reengineer the entire thing.
This is incorrect. NASA even carried out an internal study on this exact topic. [1]
Everything NASA does is trying to shoehorn in Boeing one way or another because they have tremendous political influence, but there's really no reason for them to be involved at all from a technical point of view. And in fact if they weren't, then we indeed probably would have long since already put boots on the Moon again. But because they are involved, I suspect an appropriate timeline for success is: never, with a whole lot of money spent getting there.
Source: I worked at NASA when these decisions were made. The Artemis architecture was artificially engineered to require SLS mass margins and exclude FH. This is not an accident. Alternative architectures would work just fine with FH. Orion, for example, was designed as two pieces that couple be launched separately and joined in orbit.
The idea we need to compete against ourselves is something that came straight from Boeing after they lost their bid for commercial crew, leading to them to use their connections to Congress to force NASA to make an unprecedented decision to give bids to 2 different companies. SpaceX succeeded at commercial crew putting astronauts on the ISS in 2020. Boeing, by contrast, was allowed to skip parts of the testing phase (for Commercial Crew), failed others, and was still greenlit because of corruption. And that's precisely how you ended up with the two astronauts put on their first human launch stranded on the ISS for months, only to end up getting rescued by SpaceX.
It's a nonsensical argument - we didn't create two Apollo programs, because there's no justification. And in any case, Boeing is clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a "horse" for this race. Instead we get a 3-legged mule sold at 5-time Kentucky Derby winner thoroughbred prices.