Elon Musk radically reduced the price of space launches by omitting the Senators

Elon Musk radically reduced the price of space launches by omitting the Senators. By Handre.

US Government:

The Space Launch System [SLS, an American super heavy-lift expendable launch vehicle developed by NASA for its current lunar program] costs $4.1 billion per launch. One launch.

NASA’s own inspector general confirmed that number. Boeing builds the core stage. Northrop Grumman builds the solid rocket boosters. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the engines. Every one of those contracts flows to congressional districts where senators sit on the appropriations committees that fund NASA. Coincidence?

Congress mandated the SLS in 2010 because the cancellation of the Constellation program threatened to idle the same workforce and facilities that had built the Space Shuttle. Senators Richard Shelby and Bill Nelson wrote the requirement directly into the authorization bill. They protected Alabama and Florida jobs. The politics drove the rocket, not engineering logic.

Elon Musk, America’s shadow government, doing what government can no longer do:

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lifts comparable payload for roughly $90 million.

 

The difference:

The SLS costs forty-five times more per flight. That gap destroys you as a taxpayer; you fund the difference without consent and without choice. No competitive bid. No market test. Boeing received cost-plus contracts, meaning every overrun simply became next year’s invoice to the Treasury.

Ludwig von Mises identified the central problem: when bureaucracies spend other people’s money on other people’s projects, waste is the predictable outcome, not the aberration. Congress spent $23 billion developing the SLS before its first launch in November 2022. It launched twice total by mid-2026, with the third mission schedule slipping repeatedly. The SLS is a constituency management program wearing a rocket as a costume.

Completely unrelated: