Apple cart means the pre SpaceX status quo which NASA, the primes, and Congress were totally satisfied with.

Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, et. al. are so enmeshed with the federal government it’s almost impossible to see where the one ends and the other starts. They are at best quasi-government entities.

The big clue to this is you will almost never see a cost plus contract of these sorts in the private sector.

NASA is a pale shadow of what it could be were it not so cozy with their prime contractors. Had NASA insisted on real cost reductions in space access then they would be doing 10x the science they do today. SpaceX with their reusable boosters isn’t doing anything that could not have been done as early as the 1990s. It was just not in the interest of Boeing, Lockheed, etc. financially, therefore NASA had no interest in it either.

I’m old enough to remember NASA lying to Congress about the flight rate on the Shuttle (one going up every two weeks). This was done so they could amortize the fixed overhead cost to hit their per launch targets. They were lying. Congress knew they were being lied to. And the prime pitched in to support all the outlandish claims. NASA couldn’t have cared less what it cost to launch a shuttle. Everybody got what they wanted. The primes got paid, Congress got their pork, and NASA expanded their bureaucracy. Nobody cared that the amount of science that could be done was a fraction of what might have been.

That operating dynamic continues to this day. Most of the upper echelon at NASA are more pissed at SpaceX for potentially upending the apple cart than they are excited about how much more science they can do with significantly cheaper launches.

Yeah, NASA is just a poor innocent bystander in all this. That’s why the GAO caught them hiding billions of SLS dev costs in other unrelated programs.

Why they are just as pure as the driven snow.

SpaceX has produced a hell of a lot more for a hell of a lot less money in recent years than these dinosaur aerospace contractors.

One day SpaceX may be as fat, dumb, and corrupt as these guys, but that day is not today.

$3B per launch doesn’t work either, regardless of the paper performance.

SLS is really quite the accomplishment. A rocket too expensive to launch.

It’s insanity. With these sorts of launch costs you can afford to do almost no science. Maybe you get that Artemis “first gal on the moon” photo op but not much more.

Honestly, the best outcome for space science at this point would be for the first SLS to rise gracefully off the pad, roll and arch over the Atlantic then explode over an empty piece of the ocean with the shattered remains falling harmlessly into the deep. Then maybe we could forget about this regrettable waste of money and move on to something productive.

NASA is nothing but a white collar jobs program and a means to shovel tons of money at preferred contractors. Space exploration is but a side effect of this true purpose.

The SLS costs $2B+ per launch and God only knows what the real development cost was but certainly in excess of $24B. Thank goodness they took the cost savings route.

The case is that Boeing funnels tons of money to politicians and provides cushy jobs to upper level bureaucrats and military brass once they leave the government.