No it would be "preserve institutional knowledge about building OUTDATED rockets"
If you are a tech company are you going to run your own outdated servers at 10x the cost because you would like to preserve institutional knowledge about running outdated hardware ?
Your argument would be correct if the cost difference was not that huge, the fact that it is so huge indicated that the tech they are using is very very outdated. No point in preserving anything about it.
> If you are a tech company are you going to run your own outdated servers at 10x the cost because you would like to preserve institutional knowledge about running outdated hardware ?
As a startup CTO, I will think twice about using the freshest framework or programming language, which is sexy and cool - just because I haven't seen enough people use it long enough yet. I will build a hobby project with it and love it, but or a small product that is allowed to fail, but I will not start an important new product with something like that.
Preserving knowledge is easy and cheap.
Preserving capability (that is to say, people and companies with knowledge and ability to use it) is not.
To use the metaphor, a huge part of the military procurement budget is dedicated to continue building, deploying, and operating on-prem servers.
Not because it's more efficient, but because at an international level, having a cloud provider (or in this case Russia or China) tell you "No" when you ask to renew or expand, is unacceptable.
Unlike tech, machine shops filled with trained people can't be provisioned with a click...
1. Lower Risk - based on 40+ year old proven rockets. NASA can't have failures if it wants to get future funding.
2. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs! - spreading out jobs means politicians are more likely to approve funding
The RS-25 also requires Hydrogen fuel, which in addition to being a terrible first stage fuel because of its low density and heavy tankage (which is why SRBs are required) also has been a causative factor in most of the SLS delays to date.
The RS-25 is viewed as the Ferrari of engines because of its complexity and high ISP (which is only because it uses H2 as fuel). The main thing it has proven us that it’s far too expensive for any useful application. When used on the Shuttle each RS-25 had to be entirely torn down and rebuilt between flights, a process that took months and great expense.
So the SLS takes these enormously expensive engines and burns them up after each use. The only reason RS-25s aren’t long ago put into junkyards is congress trying to favor existing space contractors.
A keralox or metholox first stage would not need super expensive SRBs, would be far easier and cheaper to build. Raptors cost $2M each in prototype form and are expected to cost under $1M in production. Each raptor also provides more thrust than an RS-25, using a far denser and easier to handle fuel.
This kind of largely unquestioned cost structure ("cost plus" contracts[2][3]) has been going on for such a long time now that nobody in that part of the industry has really accepted that the party is over.
And of course industry players don't actually have to accept that the party is over as long as government pays those old-style prices, which have been outrageous for some time and have only gone up. (They seem to have gone up even more egregiously recently, which might be an indication that industry is actually very well aware that the game is up and is trying to rake in as much as possible while they still can).
And yes, there are justifications, some of which may also be reasons (jobs, know-how, whatever ...), but I am sure that inertia is a huge part of this. If this were being decided from scratch, I doubt the outcome would be the same.
And yes, the current industry is almost certainly doomed. Yes, Falcon and Falcon Heavy are already dramatically cheaper. But Starship, if it works, is something else entirely. Game over.
I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed a fleet of 10 Starships, if reused as planned, having such an increase of capacity over what we have now that the current yearly launch capacity of the entire world becomes a footnote, a few percent of what those Starships will be able to haul into orbit by themselves.
And they're planning to mass-produce these.
Game over.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wile_E._Coyote_and_the_Road_Ru...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_contract
[3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/elon-musk-knows-what...
> Men and women in all 50 states are hard at work..
I went into my disappointment with Bezo's choice to focus on Amazon rather than take the lead at Blue Origin while Boeing is on its knees in both their commercial airliner and Aerospace program a week ago knowing something like his would occur. It just raised $25 Billion in a Bond sale [1] and now we're back to this stagnant entity clogging up the heavy lift system and we revert back to the same nepotism that has plagued aerospace for decades.
> SLS will cost upwards of a billion per launch. Compare that to $90 million for a reusable Falcon Heavy launch or ~$150 million for a disposable one.
But this helps clarify things, too.
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/boeing-raises-25-billion-bond...
Thankfully NASA is slowly moving away from insane stuff like this, but SLS/Orion are still done this way.