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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
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 21 2020, @11:29PM
There are plenty of reasons people could dare: foolishness, impotence of the target, etc. Here, it's just the right thing to do. It's the same evil that leads to those adventures you speak of, vast sums of our wealth and future spent to little purpose.