An article in the Orlando Sentinel last week provides a great snapshot into the struggle between old space and new. At issue is the SLS, nicknamed the Senate Launch System:

The rocket and capsule that NASA is proposing to return astronauts to the moon would fly just twice in the next 10 years and cost as much as $38 billion, according to internal NASA documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel. The money would pay for a new heavy-lift rocket and Apollo-like crew capsule that eventually could take astronauts to the moon and beyond. But it would not be enough to pay for a lunar landing — or for more than one manned test flight, in 2021.

The SLS is a proposed Saturn V level booster rocket that can loft around a quarter million pounds into low earth orbit and hurl an impressive 100,000 lbs in Trans-lunar injection. A wonderfully convenient, twisting figure eight making close passes over the earth and the moon once a week. But the controlling parameter in space exploration isn’t just development cost, it’s the cost per payload pound. If multiple launches of a smaller rocket can put way more mass into space at the same or lower cost than the SLS, it makes sense to go with it. If that same vehicle could be available for cargo next year, and manned flights in another year or two, all for the cost of a few hundred million a launch, it’s a good deal.

SpaceX Falcon 9 with Dragon cargo/manned capsule mounted

Space Exporation Technologies, or SpaceX, has such a vehicle in late development right now. They developed a smart schedule where the Falcon 9 booster is used to ferry cargo to the International Space Station, allowing SpaceX engineers to tweak the technology at a profit. Within just a few years the Falcon could carry the Dragon capsule; a next generation vehicle far more advanced than the Apollo command spacecraft. Boeing is embarking on a similar program with its Delta rocket series. Half a dozen other companies, traditional and new space, are hot on their heels.

I’m all for rockets, big ones, little ones, medium-sized ones. There’s no end of places for them to go, whether they carry people or probes, a vast solar system beckons. It’s just that the SLS will probably never fly given the bare development schedule, the high cost, and unpredictable future political priorities. It’ll probably die on the vine, death by a thousand budget cuts, just like it’s predecessor, the Ares V and the ambitious Constellation program. Worse, the longer it lasts the more funding it will pull from other NASA programs. The reason it keeps surviving policy changes and the deficit cutting mania so popular in DC is because the SLS delivers one payload immediately: sweet, sweet federal dollars to traditional aerospace and institutional players in the states and districts of protective politicians.