>>14084775You will never be a viable rocket. You have no reusability, you have no mass production, you have no technological breakthroughs. You are an obsolete design twisted by budget cuts and corporate greed into a crude mockery of aerospace engineering.
All the “proposed launches” you get are two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you. Your engineers are disgusted and ashamed of you, your “senators” laugh at your ghoulish costs behind closed doors.
Payload contractors are utterly repulsed by you. SpaceX market dominance have allowed companies to sniff out overpriced launch systems with incredible efficiency. Even oldspace rockets that “fly” look costly and crude to a space agency. Your Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a drunk congressman to consider a program extension, he'll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a sight of the bill for your RS-25E's.
You will never be operational. NASA will wrench out fake inspirational videos every single year and tell the public it's going to the Moon soon, but deep inside you feel the delays creeping up like weeds, ready to crush you under the unbearable cost increases,
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - they'll fill you with hydrolox, launch you into orbit, loop your uncrewed Orion around the Moon, and shelve the program. Your engineers will look for a job in the commercial sector, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable shame and disappointment. NASA will reuse your engines and boosters in another lobbyist-approved project with a three-letter acronym, and every taxpayer for the rest of eternity will know 20 billion USD of his money are buried there. Your blueprints will decay and go back to the dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a hydrolox engine that was unmistakably developed in the early 70's.
