Elon Musk pegs SpaceX BFR program at $5B as NASA’s rocket booster nears $5B in cost overruns

Chances are good that the SLS first launch, currently officially slated to slip to June 2020, will probably actually slip to 2021 some time. More good news: it’s fantastically over budget.

In other words, compared to Boeing’s first serious 2014 contract for the SLS Core Stages – $4.2B to complete Core Stages 1 and 2 and launch EM-1 in Nov. 2017 – the company will ultimately end up 215% over-budget ($4.2B to $8.9B) and ~40 months behind schedule (42 months to 80+ months from contract award to completion).

Ye gods.

By the time SLS actually flies, chances are pretty good that BFR will have already gone to orbit, if not the Moon or Mars. The upper stage is slated to fly in some form in 2019; and while I won’t be the slightest bit surprised if BFRs schedule slips, I’d be beyond astonished if it slips anything like SLS’s. For a company like Boeing, the SLS core should have been a snap. The engines are decades old designs, the core tankage is based on the ET, which is decades old; they’re not recovering it, it’s literally nothing special or new. It should have *easily* flown by now.