Absolutely! This glacial pace and glacial flightrates for SLS will be its undoing...

Shuttle at least had a flight rate, even in the post-Columbia period, that it was performing at least a couple flights per year (it did dwindle down to two flights a year the last couple years or so, and the most times a shuttle ever flew in a single 12 month period is, IIRC, 9 times, just prior to the Challenger disaster in early 1986). Shuttle's "standing army" of technicians and specialists and experts and engineers required to prepare it for flight and perform operations to sustain the capability to launch shuttle was entirely too big, which is what made it SUCH an expensive vehicle to operate, BUT, AT LEAST that standing army and huge amount of facility's costs were AMORTIZED over several flights per year... that kept the per-flight prices at least *somewhat* reasonable...

SLS, on the other hand, is DESIGNED to ONLY fly once about every other year, or maybe as much as 3 times in two years... or perhaps only once in about three years... Either way, it's a PATHETICALLY small flight rate, and while SLS has trimmed back the "standing army" *REQUIRED* to maintain the capability to build, integrate, test, and launch it, it will have to pay for MULTIPLE YEARS of the overhead of keeping all those people "on the job" and the "factory lights on" even for the years that SLS doesn't fly... SO EVERY SLS FLIGHT is now estimated at over $2 BILLION dollars!!! Saturn V wasn't cheap, though it was cheaper than shuttle. Shuttle missions were "officially estimated" at $400 million each, BUT when you take the "final drive-out price" of the shuttle program and divide it by the number of launches, it comes out to about a billion dollars per flight. Shuttle was ridiculously expensive... but SLS is going to be just STUPID expensive for what it does... And those costs are NOT going to go down-- it's not like Chevy's, where you can build a mess of them and put them in a warehouse and use them as you need them, and furlough all the factory workers, then call them back when and if you need them. No, with space vehicles, you have PROGRAM SUSTAINMENT COSTS-- you have to keep the people that actually designed the vehicle, who know how to build it, test it, integrate it, move it to the pad, and launch it, and do the million things involved in doing all that, and make the million parts required for all that, ON THE PAYROLL, whether you're flying and they're building rockets, or whether your NOT FLYING and they're all just sitting around "polishing wrenches"... The hardware and equipment to build, move, test, and maintain the rockets all have to be kept "operable"-- all the facilities and machinery, etc... you have to "keep the lights on" in the factory-- you can't just "shutter" it and let it rot til you need it again-- like with the workers, you can't just call the local union hall and have them round up a crew of UAW guys to gear up for another production run... It's all SO specialized you MUST keep the essential workers and tooling and facilities "on line" no matter what the cost, because once the expertise and tooling and facilities are gone, the rocket is basically extinct... trying to "restart" it is basically about like have to start at square one all over again...

When you consider those costs and the alternatives already "in hand" (like Falcon Heavy) and being worked on (ULA's Vulcan, Blue Origin's "New Glenn", Spacex's "Starship", etc) then basically SLS is an anachronism... it's the right rocket, 20-25 years too late! SLS would have been a great addition to operate hand in hand with shuttle, using similar layouts and sharing boosters, engines, tooling, etc. But NOW, it's basically just taking the MOST EXPENSIVE BITS of the shuttle that were designed for REUSE, and using them in expendable mode! SLS was "justified" on the grounds that it was "shuttle derived", so would be "easy to do"-- the core stage was just a rework of the existing Shuttle External Tank, and thus would only require slight rework of the load paths, and constructing a cylindrical O2 tank with ellipsoidal upper bulkheads instead of the ogive nosecone O2 tank, which was all seen as "quick and easy" to do. Here we are 9 years later and the thing STILL hasn't flown, and basically the whole thing is a COMPLETE REWORK of ALL the shuttle-derived parts into new ones that had to be completely requalified... PLUS the reengineered parts are the most expensive parts of the shuttle system-- the SRB's with their high sustainment costs, which were *slightly* amortized by reusing the cases, and the super complicated and super-expensive RS-25 SSME engines, which again, were justified in their cost and complexity since they were designed for reuse... BUT SLS is an expendable rocket, and will dump ALL these expensive bits into the bottom of the ocean on EACH FLIGHT... It's nuts.

Meanwhile, for the cost of ONE SLS, you could buy a whole FLEET of Falcon Heavy launches capable of lofting the same mass to orbit, or darn close to it! Just designing and building a hydrogen upper stage for the Falcon Heavy would give it ENORMOUS lifting power to orbit, due to the greater efficiency over the kerosene upper stage, and at a TINY fraction of the cost of SLS.

Nevermind there's no PAYLOADS for SLS... Well, other than an Orion which, with it's INTERIM upper stage, can perform a quasi-Apollo 8 mission, in a high looping orbit around the Moon that basically spends a few minutes down close to the low lunar orbit Apollo was in, and most of the rest of a day looping out in a highly elliptical orbit a couple thousand miles above the Moon... it's crazy. The Altair lunar lander was axed over a decade ago, and the Gateway station, as well as any "Artemis" lunar lander still exists only on paper, as do the necessary upper stages, service modules, etc. required for SLS and Orion to do basically ANYTHING beyond an anemic and extremely expensive test program that's already years behind schedule and will be drawn out over a number of years as well, with years between missions! We'd do well to remember, Apollo 8 orbited the Moon at Christmas 1968 on the FIRST manned Saturn V flight, and first flight beyond Earth orbit, and it was followed just seven months later by the first manned lunar landing, and the rest of the Moon missions basically took place every 4-6 months after that, ending in December of 72, just four years after Apollo 8.

Here we are, 50 years later, with technological capabilities that were UNDREAMED OF in the Apollo days, with the benefit of 50 years of advances in computers, flight experience, materials, processes, procedures, instrumentation, metrology, and every other form of technology and testing known to man, and this is the best we can do??? It's pathetic...

The Apollo guys were doing EVERYTHING for pretty much the *FIRST TIME*... EVERYTHING was basically breaking new ground, inventing new technology as they went along, or using existing technology in a TOTALLY new way on scales that had never been attempted, and they succeeded BRILLIANTLY in absolute record time... and now with 50 years of experience, hindsight, and technological advances to draw upon, *THIS* is what we get... truly sad!

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!