https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work." - ad-homming the author conveniently saves you from having to post anything interesting or refute any of the claims in the article. People don't need industry experience to compare NASA 2024 with NASA 1969 and observe that things are going worse; results are down, costs and delays are up.
It'd do you well to read before making a fool of yourself.
Everyone who's been paying attention to space stuff is aware of the mentioned issues. The fact is that NASA's hands are tied, they literally are not allowed to cancel SLS, as they have been legislated into using it for Artemis by Congress, who wants to keep pumping billions into Boeing. Until Senator Shelby retired a few years ago, NASA was forbidden from even talking about orbital refueling (under threat of having the entire space technology program cancelled), because that'd make the waste of money on SLS unnecessary. They literally redacted the word 'depot' in their public report on the selection of Starship as the primary Artemis lunar lander (despite it being obvious that's what they were referring to).
Congress is so desperate on forcing SLS to be used, after NASA blindsided them by choosing SpaceX for the first HLS lander (instead of the other two far more expensive, far more technically immature proposals which were designed around tons of waste and possibly using SLS), they tried to make it so the second one had to use SLS, on top of mandating that they would have to launch at least 1 cargo SLS per year, regardless of payload: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/an-alabama-lawmaker-...
The $4B per launch cost comes from a GAO report, it should be emphasized that prior to this report, NASA went out of its way to avoid counting SLS manufacturing costs so that the embarrassment of how wasteful it is would not become obvious: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-wh...
