IMO, NASA/Congress will hang on to SLS for as long as it is remotely defensible.
The US will need 2 heavy lift, large diameter rockets before SLS gets the axe. Once Starship and New Glenn are flying it'll be significantly more difficult to justify the $2 billion / year spent just on the SLS program (not counting the actual rockets, which are another $1 billion a pop).
Exactly. Governments and large multinationals don’t like relying on a single supplier for anything because a single supplier is a single point of failure. No matter how good a new option is, they’ll keep the old option on life support until they have a third option.
I dare say it has little to do with having a third option (since SLS is still years away from being an option) and more to do with pork barrel politics.
Oh, I'm sure that's also a major factor. I just meant that we shouldn't expect the U.S. government to 'pick a winner' and cancel SLS even if they're competing head to head and it's clear SpaceX is blowing SLS out of the water.
With the ungodly amount of money spent on SLS they could support and build multible large rockets easly. The SLS is the single point of failure you should try to avoid.
I read that article all the way to the end, which was quite a slog. (You can definitely tell this guy is in the business of stretching out content to fit in more ad breaks) The conclusion at the end appears to be "NASA didn't see Starship coming at all, and built a very conservative, very expensive expendable launch system, that underperforms Starship on every metric". There is a logical next step, after you come to that conclusion...
It is, of course, very reasonable to wait for Starship to actually launch and demonstrate a couple flights. But I would be very very surprised if SLS still exists in two years.
Yes. Can we cancel the NASA Space Launch System now?