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posted by martyb on Saturday March 21 2020, @07:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the But-it's-only-$2-milllion-per-week! dept.

NASA spent a decade and nearly $1 billion for a single launch tower:

"NASA exacerbated these issues by accepting unproven and untested designs."

A new report published Tuesday by NASA's inspector general looks into the development of a mobile launch tower for the agency's Space Launch System rocket.

The analysis finds that the total cost of constructing and modifying the structure, known as Mobile Launcher-1, is "at least" $927 million. This includes the original $234 million development cost to build the tower to support the Ares I rocket.

After this rocket was canceled in 2010, NASA then spent an additional $693 million to redesign and modify the structure for the SLS rocket. Notably, NASA's original estimate for modifying the launch tower was just $54 million, according to the report by Inspector General Paul Martin.

<no-sarcasm>
Does NASA understand what a sunk cost is?
</no-sarcasm>

Related: NASA to Launch 247 Petabytes of Data Into AWS - but Forgot About Egress Costs


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  • (Score: -1) by MyOpinion on Saturday March 21 2020, @06:27PM (4 children)

    by MyOpinion (6561) on Saturday March 21 2020, @06:27PM (#973887) Homepage Journal

    There is no "outer space": gas always expands into all available space, filling up its container entirely. Whatever "gravity" theory you come up with, and even in theory, cannot stick it to the outside of a ball against empty space, because gases expand into empty space. It is what they do, this is a fact of life, 100% verifiable 100% of the time.

    Yet, some men want to convince you that there is some "outer vacuum" where they venture to, conveniently have their cameras off most of the time, "losing signal" despite the "tens of thousands of satellites", and see the world we live in from a vantage point that is thermodynamically impossible to exist.

    I don't know what NASA do, if they are solely clowning around scamming you for more than $50 million a day, or if they actually do some work that they do not publicly disclose, but I surely know how gases behave because I can test and observe them all day long. And so can you.

    Cool story, "sphere worlds inside a vacuum", not a single shred of proof though. Pure fantasy.

    --
    Truth is like a Lion: you need not defend it; let it loose, and it defends itself. https://discord.gg/3FScNwc
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:00PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 21 2020, @10:00PM (#973941)

    Get coronavirus.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday March 23 2020, @04:42PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 23 2020, @04:42PM (#974477) Journal

      No thanks.

      I'll wait until it goes on sale.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:19AM (#973975)

    Hilarious! But how do you explain that the higher you go from the Earth's surface, the thinner the atmosphere is? Obviously some sort of evil scientist trick probably already debunked on facebook.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:39AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:39AM (#973977) Journal

    gas always expands into all available space, filling up its container entirely.

    It still remains that there's many orders of magnitude less dense gas in space than on the surface of Earth, and it has a vastly different composition, mostly of hydrogen and helium, some which is ionized.

    "losing signal" despite the "tens of thousands of satellites"

    There's a variety of reasons that happens, for example, passing over the limb/horizon of Earth so that communication needs to switch from one communication node to another, or reentering Earth in which case, the spacecraft is surrounded by relatively high density plasma (visible from the ground, I might add) which blocks communication via radio waves.

    Further, most of the "satellites" are bits of debris, unsuitable for any purpose, much less communication.