Are the historical costs of shuttle development a sunk cost that shouldn’t be used for decision making going forward? Would a business assign these costs to units to recoup the investment? But then, how does that apply to a NASA which doesn’t generate revenue?

Both the marginal cost and the shared total cost are important numbers but how those numbers are used to make decisions are more important.

The way government does things muddles decision making and trying to compare the way government does something with how private enterprise does is often not fair because the two groups have different goals and justifications for how money is spent and how money is gathered. Its like comparing scores in soccer and football. Its almost meaningless because two different games are being played.

The best thing about a COTS like approach in paying for services is that it strips away a lot of the distortions that cause government to make bad decisions.

This is also why single customer healthcare is such a horrible idea and we should be working to reduce government’s and insurance companies’ roles in running the healthcare industry.

Blair Ivey’s number comes from the annual Shuttle budget being about $3 billion and there being about six flights per year.

I used to use Blair’s number until the program ended, when I learned the facts that generate Dick’s number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget

That’s in the neighborhood of a single Shuttle mission. Things that make you go ‘Hmmm’.

Richard Malcolm: Excellent point. Falcon Heavy’s launch was also delayed because of the 2016 launchpad failure, a delay having nothing to do with the rocket’s development.

Amazing what you can do when you don’t have any politicians to answer to.

Makes you wonder why NASA awarded commercial crew to Boeing rather than Sierra Nevada.

No need to wonder. Sierra Nevada was running five years late on their CCiCap contract.

Originally slated to launch from Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39B in December 2017, a 322-foot-tall version of the rocket known as SLS Block 1

Someone should do a cartoon where the stack of money spent on SLS/Orion is placed on the launch pad with flames licking the bottom and another one like the rocket size comparisons where the in scale stack of money is shown next to SLS.