Because Congress critters use it as a means to spend taxpayer money on purchasing votes. They'll do pretty much anything to avoid having to admit that SLS was a mistake.
Is "Moon Policy" anywhere near the ballot box? Particularly for senators? To the extent it might be, isn't it the inverse problem, to cancel the program is to lose jobs. So they're mostly just being held hostage by the monopoly.
The person you are voting for has fantastically small power. Which, is not what we were taught, but it does seem to be the fact.
The topic buying the votes isn't moon policy, it's that they're creating jobs. SLS was being given absurd sums of money for development well before Artemis was a thing.
Canceling SLS would mean losing jobs, yes. But that's not because of some sort of Boeing monopoly on space (they're obviously not a monopoly in that area), it's because the program is designed to be inefficient, with tons of 3rd party suppliers intentionally spread across the entire country, and tons of extra red tape to justify creating more jobs. They and other old school defense contractors specifically advertise these projects with the promise of creating jobs in all 50 states.
I'd disagree on the claim that the senators have fantastically small power on this matter, a single senator was capable of holding back in-space refueling tech for at least a decade under threat of canceling the entire space technologies program (because if you can refuel in space, even launching several medium lift disposable rockets is more efficient, and that'd mean no need for SLS, affecting jobs in his area).
It seems to me they just repurposed other industries and companies that were dwindling or going out of business anyways. I'm failing to see the millions of people put to work on this project.
> they're obviously not a monopoly in that area
SLS was officially started in 2011. SpaceX just had it's first successful launch and public verification of their platform in 2008. The situation today is different than it was when SLS was being put together. I think it's worth understanding in that context. Aside from that, Boeing is a monopoly, which grants them lots of power to manipulate the government.
> They and other old school defense contractors specifically advertise these projects with the promise of creating jobs in all 50 states.
Okay.. then how do they connect that back to specific senators in the minds of the voters to help them get elected?
> a single senator was capable of holding back
Was that simply because he was a senator or because he was on a _specific_ committee? Do we want to get into how committee assignments are handed out? Or how that particular "power" actually functions?
> because if you can refuel in space
Maintaining cryogenics in orbit is actually harder than people admit and you're resting a huge part of your argument on a very shaky ideal here.
>Okay.. then how do they connect that back to specific senators in the minds of the voters to help them get elected?
I feel like this should be obvious? The work is distributed across the country, but a state like New York or California is obviously less dependent on jobs from this than other states.
>Was that simply because he was a senator or because he was on a _specific_ committee? Do we want to get into how committee assignments are handed out? Or how that particular "power" actually functions?
He was on the senate appropriations committee, and considering that 30% of the senate is on the committee and we don't get to control who gets on it, I'd argue it still supports the point that senators have much more than just "fantastically small power" as you put it.
>SLS was officially started in 2011. SpaceX just had it's first successful launch and public verification of their platform in 2008. The situation today is different than it was when SLS was being put together. I think it's worth understanding in that context.
That doesn't cover the insistence from Congress on using it today and for the next 30 years.
>Maintaining cryogenics in orbit is actually harder than people admit and you're resting a huge part of your argument on a very shaky ideal here.
If only any serious research on long term cryogenic storage in orbit had been permitted, we'd know exactly how hard it is!
> Probably the same reason the Space Shuttle wasn't cancelled even through pretty early on it was clear that it didn't make sense.
Upper management decisions are seldom made for good technical reasons.
> SLS's existence has nothing to do with upper management. This is the child of Congress who funded it without any sort of mission.
Which is a big part of why Artemis is kind of messed up - neither SLS nor Orion was designed with the mission in mind. So Orion has to go to a relatively high near "rectilinear halo orbit" instead of Apollo's "low lunar orbit" because the SLS/Orion system doesn't have enough delta-V to get to the superior orbit and back.
