NASA's $23.8 B Moon Rocket is Completely OUTDATED, Can't Beat China. SpaceX Starship to Save...

15 years in development, $30 billion 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Space Launch System, a rocket that is not only outrageously expensive and wildly inefficient, but also one of the most outdated launch vehicles NASA is currently operating.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 AlphaTech. 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 11 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% of the entire U.S. 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 V powered by the legendary F-1 engines. Those engines were so powerful that in terms of sheer raw thrust, a single F-1 still dwarfs SpaceX's modern Raptor 3 about 680 tons of thrust versus roughly 280 tons. But despite that incredible power, the F-1 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 F-1 engine cost more than 2 million U.S. 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. At the heart of that idea was the RS-25, the Space Shuttle main engine. The RS-25 was a cryogenic masterpiece burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, producing around 186 tons of thrust per engine. Far weaker than the F-1 in raw power, but critically it was reusable. That single design choice became the core reason the shuttle program, while expensive, could still be considered a real technological success. Then, after the shuttle was retired in 2011, the paradox returned this time in one of NASA's modern programs, SLS. NASA took these reusable RS-25 engines and mounted them onto a fully expendable one in Dunn Rocket. Wait, what? How is this any different from resurrecting the same expensive, outdated Saturn? Five philosophy all over again. So, yes, at a fundamental level, that's exactly what's happening. NASA's justification is that they wanted to reuse the 16 RS-25 engines left over after the Space Shuttle program ended. 16 engines enough for just four missions from Artemis 1 through Artemis 4. Fine. Let's assume they actually use all 16. Even then, the maximum amount of money NASA saves is only around $600 million. Now, put that number next to the reality of SLS. As of today, NASA has already spent roughly $30 billion on this rocket, a fully expendable vehicle powered by engines designed in the 20th century, plagued by chronic liquid hydrogen leaks, and repeatedly delayed before almost every single flight. So, when you step back and look at the full picture, the costs, the design, choices, the operational headaches, if there were just one word to describe SLS, only one word fits outdated. On Artemis 1, all four RS-25 engines had already flown a combined 25 space shuttle missions. For Artemis, two NASA is using three flight-proven engines with a combined 22 previous shuttle flights, plus one engine that has never flown but was built largely from shuttle-era components. Technically, these engines are extraordinary. The RS-25 is a cryogenic stage combustion masterpiece with a specific impulse exceeding 450 seconds, one of the most efficient chemical rocket engines ever built. But here's the contradiction. These engines were designed to be reused dozens of times, removed, inspected, refurbished, and flown again. On SLS, they fly once and then sink into the ocean along with the core stage. That isn't just wasteful, it's a clear sign of technological stagnation. While SpaceX is pushing the Raptor toward hundreds of flights per engine, the RS-25 on SLS is still rooted in 50-year-old technology. And starting with Artemis 5, the situation gets even worse. NASA must contract L3Harris Technologies to build brand new RS-25 engines from scratch, each costing roughly $145 million. Why is it so expensive? Because production rates are extremely low, and the program never takes advantage of mass manufacturing the very mechanism SpaceX uses to drive Raptor costs down. And then there are the boosters. The two massive solid rocket boosters, or SRBs, generate over 75% of SLS's liftoff thrust. Their design is almost a direct inheritance from the 1980s space shuttle era, when each booster consisted of four solid segments. SLS stretches that design to five segments, increasing thrust by about 20%, and total impulse by 24%. The boosters also feature a redesigned nozzle lighter and safer asbestos-free insulation and updated avionics. But look deeper, and most of the technology is still old. They continue to use the same P-B-A-N solid propellant developed decades ago. The steel casings are pulled straight from shuttle-era inventory, some of them actually flew on shuttle missions. Even the manufacturing processes remain largely unchanged, carried over from the Ares and Constellation programs. The biggest operational change. These boosters are no longer recovered. There are no parachutes anymore. After burnout, both SRBs fall directly into the ocean, fully expendable. Despite incremental upgrades, SLS SSRBs are widely considered obsolete. They never transitioned to lighter composite materials, never adopted modern solid propellants, and remain fully dependent on Northrop Grumman's legacy supply chain. As shuttle hardware stocks continue to run out, NASA is now forced to manufacture new components, but still to the original design, not a truly modern one. That real modernization known as BOL, the Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension Program, is being developed separately and only for the future Block II version of SLS. Now let's shift to a completely different perspective and look at SpaceX's Starship. This is a vehicle developed in the same era as SLS, yet it embodies a philosophy so modern that the contrast is almost jarring. While SLS still leans heavily on technology rooted in the 1970s and 1980s, Starship was designed from day one as a fully reusable system, built around a simple but radical idea, fly, often fly cheap and fly big. This is what Elon Musk and SpaceX believe is the real turning point, transforming spaceflight from a rare ceremonial event into something routine. Start with raw power. With the super-heavy booster, Starship has already surpassed SLS in liftoff thrust. 33 Raptor engines generate over 20 million pounds of thrust at sea level, more than double the 8.8 million pounds produced by SLS Block I. That makes Starship the most powerful rocket ever built, surpassing even the legendary Saturn V. Payload capability tells the same story. Starship is targeting up to 200 tons to low Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration far beyond SLS Block I's roughly 95 tons, and still well ahead of the 130 tons projected for future SLS Block II or Block III variants. With on-orbit refueling, Starship can deliver over 100 tons directly to the lunar surface, something SLS and Orion simply cannot do. And let's be clear, SLS is just the launcher. Orion itself is essentially a deep space capsule, no lunar landing capability whatsoever. But the biggest difference, the reason Starship feels genuinely modern, is reusability. Starship is built so that both the super-heavy booster and the Starship vehicle fly again. The booster returns to the launch site, gets caught by the tower's chopsticks, undergoes rapid inspection, and flies again. The goal is dozens of flights per vehicle, and eventually hundreds. SLS is the complete opposite. It is fully expendable fly once and everything is gone. Years of engineering effort, precision, and craftsmanship vanish into the ocean after a single launch. The result is an extremely slow launch cadence, one flight every two years, driven by long manufacturing timelines, complex supply chains, and staggering costs. And that brings us to cost. Depending on the estimate, each SLS launch can approach $4 billion, despite using legacy hardware, low production rates, and zero reusability. Starship, even while still in testing, is targeting something radically different. SpaceX estimates $2 to $10 million per flight in an optimized reusable configuration. Even in a temporary expendable mode, costs are expected to stay around $100 million, still orders of magnitude cheaper than SLS. Elon Musk has repeatedly said, the long-term goal is to drive launch costs down to just a few million dollars per mission, enabled by rapid reuse and mass production. So the question becomes unavoidable. If SLS costs billions per launch just to support a handful of lunar missions, is it really worth it? Starship, despite its early struggles, improves with every flight. Each test shortens the path forward toward sustained lunar presence and ultimately toward Mars. That's something even Apollo at its peak could only dream of. Sometime around 2028, or possibly later, if delays continue the way they have. So far, the next evolution of NASA's heavy-lift rocket is expected to appear, SLS Block 1B. Compared to the current version, the biggest changes are concentrated in the upper stage. Instead of the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, which relies on a single RL-10 engine, NASA is introducing the all-new exploration upper stage. EUS is powered by four RL-10 C-3 engines. Its liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks are significantly larger, enabling more reliable multiple restarts, a critical capability for complex lunar trajectories and deep space missions. The result is a substantial jump in performance, while SLS Block 1 can deliver roughly 27 tons to translunar injection. Block 1B increases that to about 38 tons in the crewed configuration, and up to 42 tons in the cargo variant. And yet, no matter how you frame it, it is still an expendable, outdated rocket. So why does it continue to exist? The core answer isn't technical, it's jobs. SLS and Orion support tens of thousands of workers spread across nearly every U.S. state, from Boeing facilities in the Pacific Northwest to Northrop Grumman operations in Utah, down to countless smaller subcontractors scattered across hundreds of congressional districts. A NASA economic report from 2019 estimated that the program supported more than 69,000 jobs and injected roughly $14 billion into the U.S. economy.