Cut and burn Republicans usually interested in eliminating grandma’s health insurance and pension in favor of their rich, thieving friends can’t get themselves enough government spending in some cases. And so it is with the decaying corpse of NASA, there’s meat on them thar bones for shortsighted politicians to pilfer yet! One of them goes by the name of the Space Launch System or SLS. There it is over to the right, in conceptual form anyway.

Critics point out that yes, there are lots of places to go in the solar system, and this rocket could sure get us there. It’s just that the SLS will never go to any of them because it will never actually be finished and thus never fly. It won’t be done for a decade or more, it will cost between 25 and 50 billion dollars if it were fully funded through that period, and it will basically do what the Saturn V did 40 years ago for a tenth the price and in less than half the time in the unlikely event it ever is finished and goes operational.

Meanwhile there are existing cargo rockets and other components in late stage testing which will be able to assemble structures the size of the ISS for a fraction of the cost within the next two or three years. There are a whole bunch of people at NASA who are opposed to this boondoggle, but alas the forces of pork politics have, so far at least, been winning out. They don’t see NASA as a manned space program. For a handful of conservative politicians it’s an extremely inefficient jobs program benefitting a few thousand employees and the traditional aerospace contractors that still feed on NASA’s remains, in those deserving bastions of science — also known as Huntsville, Alabama and Houston, Texas.