Both will carry a seven-man crew. Both will be re-usable ten times. Both will use a pusher escape system. Both will land on land.

After that, I think you’re down in the weeds.

Why? It’s because…

” Oil companies get over $4 billion every year in tax breaks. Spend that on NASA and we can stop worrying about SLS vs this and SOFIA vs that.”

…we know that there’s a snowball’s chance of that scenario actually happening. Anybody can say ‘just take the money from X.’ (For non-space advocates, NASA often is their preferred ‘X’ to rob for whatever they think is more important.)

“That’s all small potatoes.”

True. And irrelevant. NASA’s not going to be given someone else’s potatoes without a major fight. Work within what’s likely to be achievable, not within a fantasy of unlimited reallocation of government money.

‘NASA budget should — and easily could — be doubled to $35 billion.

First…no. Not easily. Second, NASA’s primary problem is one of policy, not money. If the ‘One Penny’ advocates got their wish, how would it be spent? Double the money for everything NASA does, right down to janitor salaries? Some of their projects are doing fine. More would only invite waste. Some need more, but not twice as much. More would invite waste. Some do need an approximate doubling, particularly Commercial Crew, but no more than that.

And some things are a bad idea at any price. Throwing more money at bad policy won’t make it good policy. (Trust me, in a ‘doubled NASA budget’ environment,’ SLS supporters would try to grab more than double their current portion…and still not move the operational date one day closer.)

I further have to guess you’ve never been on an airplane flight that was cancelled because of a hardware problem. If you have a hardware problem on a space mission, you’re likely sunk. If you have a problem on an airplane, you fix it and fly. You lose a day or two. No sweat. So that’s really a strength that you’re pointing to, rather than a weakness. SOFIA is hands-on science.

As to chasing interesting targets identified by Herschel, well, that’s just the way science works, where you go after interesting things identified by previous workers, but you ideally do it with new sensors that tell you different things. It would have been nice if SOFIA had first crack at some of these things, but that it didn’t hardly justifies pulling the rug out from under it.

Consider humans to Mars. Gosh, they’re just going to be following up things that our rovers are doing. Those rovers really scooped our plans to send astronauts there, didn’t they? So let’s pull the rug out from under our hopes to send humans to Mars to do science. I’m serious. The first plans for doing science on Mars never ever considered that a lot of it would be done robotically.

As to “sick, out of date science instruments”, that’s just a totally fabricated and strangely biased comment. The instrumentation on SOFIA is cutting edge. New instruments are coming on line to do things that previous observatories couldn’t touch.

“Sunk costs” don’t apply to SOFIA. SOFIA works. It’s taking data and papers are being published in quality journals. Just that simple. It’s doing what it was supposed to do. So “sunk costs” is perhaps a fallacy, but just in your post.

Now, that doesn’t forgive the management mistakes that led to the delay of the program. Lessons were learned.