It doesn't necessarily work like that. SLS is expensive in part because it scatters jobs around to various important Senators and Representatives' districts. It's in part a jobs program.
Jobs, I think, is part of it but not the whole story.
Imagine if NASA was solely located in Alabama where von Braun set up shop. I think it would have been defunded in short order and there would be no NASA and, by extension, no SpaceX (since they are so reliant on govt contracts)
That's the same story, isn't it? You'd only have two senators and a handful of reps really caring about maintaining NASA jobs.
Put JPL in California, mission control in Texas, launches in Florida, and a bunch of manufacturing at Boeing and you've got a much, much wider Congressional support base.
Look at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/ESDSuppliersMap/ - they've even managed to spread suppliers around to Alaska, Montana, and Hawaii. Every single state has at least some jobs that depend on SLS.
Yes, I just think calling it a “jobs program” misses some of the nuance. You could ostensibly have the same number of jobs but much more political risk by concentrating them in one geographic area.
The political risk is the more salient point to me, and jobs is just a way to mitigate it. (You could also, for example, mitigate it with less productive means like lobbying)
(Suppliers is a different story. A lot of time NASA is handcuffed by which suppliers actually want work with them. There’s a lot of hoops to jump through and many suppliers just don’t find it worth the hassle)
I don't think being that cynical is warranted here.
1) The requirements aren't levied by congress. They are created by NASA civil servants who are usually the technical experts in a particular field. These aren't people who have much of any interface with lobbyists.
2) A lot of the instances where it's not worth it to suppliers isn't because they are being boxed out by some industry giant clamoring for some giant contract. It's usually closer to "it's not worth our effort to overhaul our manufacturing process to meet requirements so we can sell NASA a $70 teflon seal." The giant corps have little desire here either. But being a big manufacturer is sometimes correlated with having a more mature manufacturing process that meets specific standards.
Those drive some of the main contractors (like Aerojet Rocketdyne) but not all those others in that protracted list. Those are selected by the supplier quality process defined by typical civil servants, not Congress.
This was about how that long list of suppliers gets selected, not about how they make money. If you look through my previous posts, you’ll see I acknowledged most of these suppliers aren’t on the list to make a ton of money from NASA, and that a lot of suppliers don’t even attempt to make the list for that very reason.
There’s already enough corruption in govt, we don’t have to make believe it’s in places that’s it’s not.
Thanks for sharing the map, that's pretty interesting. I wonder what NASA or their contractors got from Lowe's Home Improvement?
Is there any infrastructure there for the mission? My cynical side wonders if someone flew to Honolulu, went to a hardware store to pick up some JB Weld, and flew it back to Florida just so they could check off Hawaii on the list of states.
It’s important to note that being listed as a “supplier” doesn’t mean NASA has actually purchased anything. A lot of times, it’s preemptive as a way of ensuring all the quality checks have been put in place so an PO can just be issued when needed without the delay.*
It also doesn’t mean they want spaceflight material. It can just be something needed to support the project, like shelving to hold extra parts. But if the charge code is traceable to the program, it makes the list.
More importantly it's a capability program. People and organizations who can build rockets, execute space missions, and have regular work doing so is necessary if you want to maintain the institutional knowledge and manufacturing capacity to do so.
That was a good argument in 2009 but it's a bad argument now. There are currently over 100 rocket companies in the US. Having those people work on dead end technologies like SLS rather than forward looking technologies like Starship or RocketLab Neutron or Relativity Terran R or Blue Origin New Glenn etc hurts rather than helps.
They are getting fractions of that. NASA funds small missions across a wide variety of such companies. It’s how SpaceX started. It’s been one of the most effective NASA programs ever, IMO.
The commercial programs have seen significant expansion in scope and spending as their benefits have become clear. The lunar landing contract to SpaceX is a great example of such.
Astra, Rocket Lab, etc. have to demonstrate capability to move up the ladder.
Again, I doubt it. NASA funding doesn't really work that way. They don't get a big bucket of funds to distribute as they please. SLS was the pet project of a number of powerful Senators, to the point where the joke is it's the "Senate Launch System", and has been specifically appropriated for by Congress.
There are ALWAYS politicians who are happy to give the money to their project. The idea that NASA budget would go down by 5 billion $ without SLS/Orion isn't really credible in my opinion. Some projects would be done, because Senators in space states wouldn't want the budget to just get lost.
Technically, yes, SLS can send people around the Moon, but gotta remember that Starship is very much on the critical path to the actual goal of boots on the Moon.
So, 'currently' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, not to mention in general the idea of SLS being ready to send people to the Moon now is a bit of a stretch too since Artemis II will be ready to launch in 2024 if we're lucky, which is also when (if we're lucky), Lunar Starship should be starting its testing.
And high-end manufacturing capability is very important to have domestically from a defense perspective.
I recall some NPR story recently about war games the US runs about a hypothetical war with China -- it was said that the US loses most of the time in these simulations. Why? A lack of industrial capability.
