[Update March 2022: During a
House Science Committee hearing NASA OIG Paul Martin revealed that the marginal launch cost for each of the first four Artemis SLS launches was $4.1b. This doesn’t include any development costs, which will total $93b by 2025. Incredible!]
Can you imagine showing up for your day job and telling your boss that your salary is now a secret, but at least 3x higher than the day before, and that your work product was going to be a decade late? Even the people whose only job is to know exactly how much the SLS costs apparently do not know.
The only metrics that matter for big rockets and humans in space is $/T and T/year. By an unbelievably huge margin, the SLS has mismanaged itself into the wrong end of the field on both these axes, with a rocket that costs maybe 20x more per tonne and, due to its appallingly low flight rate, delivers less mass to orbit in a year than SpaceX can in a fortnight, in 2021.
The SpaceX Starship is designed to deliver on order a million tonnes to orbit a year, for about $100/kg. That’s 15,000 times the stuff for 1/500th the cost. I have no doubt that the Starship development program will have its surprises and setbacks but they’ve already flown to 12.5km – roughly as high as the stack of $100 bills already spent on SLS would reach. Even if Starship comes in at 10x the design cost it will still be 50x cheaper than the competition. Would you spend $20k on a car, or $1m on the same car? It’s hard to even make meaningful comparisons here.