this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Eric Burger has been against SLS for like 15 years, it’s his whole schtick. Loves making points about how expensive it is, about how late it was, and that it means NASA can’t design rockets anymore. Never talks the other side - how Congress hamstrung the design, how it was consistently under-funded, and how it was shackled to Boeing at the same time that the entire company hit the skids.
SLS was forced to be a Frankenstein rocket slash jobs program by legislative fiat. Of course it’s not sustainable in a financially-constrained environment - it was designed to spread money and jobs just as much as it was designed to deliver payloads.
It’s still the only thing that can put an Orion vehicle in orbit, and Orion is the only vehicle we’ve got today that can get crew off the earth and to lunar orbit, and Artemis I was a masterpiece launch of a first-build rocket.
Another SLS hit piece from Ars Technica isn’t news, it’s just noise.
There's an entire genre of political/economic/military writing that is essentially the epitome of "perfect is ~~not~~ the enemy of good". Where the existing systems or projects, being less than perfect because of decades of compromises, are trashed because they're not as perfect as [insert author's golden child here].
They're not necessarily wrong that whatever alternative could be better. They're just incredibly unrealistic to think that their project would be the one that springs fully formed from the launchpad as they envisioned.
The F-35 is another common target of "this was the worst plan/plane ever". Usually they leave out is that most of the chief opponents of the F-35 were also against the F-15, because they wanted simple expendable planes that are good at dog-fighting ~~because WW2 was cool~~. They leave that part out because the F-15 is/was the most successful air superiority fighter ever made.