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.
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Does NASA understand what a sunk cost is?
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Related: NASA to Launch 247 Petabytes of Data Into AWS - but Forgot About Egress Costs
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 22 2020, @12:39AM
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.
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.