WASTED! NASA's gigantic $23B rocket Major Internal Failure. Starship to replace, Why not?
WASTED! NASA's gigantic $23B rocket Major Internal Failure. Starship to replace, Why not?
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WASTED! NASA's gigantic $23B rocket Major Internal Failure. Starship to replace, Why not?
Fifteen years in development. Thirty billion dollars spent. Engines whose core design dates back more than half a century. And yet, just one single flight to show for it.
Yes, we’re talking about NASA’s Space Launch System, a rocket that is not only outrageously expensive and wildly inefficient, but also one of the most outdated launch vehicles NASA is currently operating.
This is a fact that pretty much everyone in the space community already knows.
But why does SLS still exist today? The answer is far more surprising than most people think.
Let’s break it all down in today’s episode of Alpha Tech.
WASTED! NASA's gigantic $23B rocket Major Internal Failure. Starship to replace, Why not?
There was a time when the United States achieved something so extraordinary that, even now, it almost sounds unreal.
From the moment NASA was founded to the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, only 11 years had passed. Yes, just eleven years. From 1958 to 1969, culminating in Apollo 11.
But behind that seemingly magical timeline was something even more astonishing: an unprecedented level of national focus. At its peak, NASA was receiving nearly 4 percent of the entire US GDP. The full weight of the American economy was thrown behind a single goal.
Hundreds of thousands of engineers, scientists, and skilled workers, spread across hundreds of private companies, were all pulling in the same direction. And out of that effort came the Saturn 5, powered by the legendary F1 engines.
WASTED! NASA's gigantic $23B rocket Major Internal Failure. Starship to replace, Why not?
Those engines were so powerful that, in terms of sheer raw thrust, a single F1 still dwarfs SpaceX’s modern Raptor 3, about 680 tons of thrust versus roughly 280 tons.
But despite that incredible power, the F1 became obsolete almost immediately after the Apollo program ended. And the reason was simple: it was not reusable. Each engine was thrown away after a single flight, and that came at an enormous cost. At the time, one F1 engine cost more than two million US dollars—a staggering sum by 1960s standards.
That realization triggered a fundamental shift in thinking at NASA.
The Space Shuttle program was born as a direct response to the lessons of Apollo: if spaceflight was ever going to become sustainable and more affordable, the cost per launch had to come down—and that meant flying hardware again and again, not discarding it after one use.
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