First of all, NASA as a whole is hardly adrift. Does a rudderless space agency operate Mars rovers, staff a laboratory in Earth orbit, and build a gold-plated space telescope? Secondly, while the USA Today piece credits NASA for its wisdom to outsource ISS flights to the private sector, it neglects to mention it was NASA itself that helped enable the most prominent of these companies, SpaceX, to exist. (Recall that SpaceX was on the verge of bankruptcy in late 2008 before landing a $1.6 billion contract for ISS cargo flights.) NASA must be doing something right!

The USA Today story also says SLS has not justified its existence, and that it "fails to answer the overarching, existential question: Why?" This is posed as a rhetorical question, but there's actually a simple answer! It exists because it can lift large, heavy things.

The Space Launch System's roots can be traced back to 2005, when then-NASA administrator Michael Griffin commissioned an internal report called the Exploration Systems Architecture Study. The study concluded "as many as nine" Atlas or Delta launches would be required for a single lunar mission, whereas a heavy lift rocket could get the job done more efficiently. That led to Ares V, which was canceled and reborn as SLS. The heavy lift concept intuitively makes sense—think of how many rocket launches, shuttle flights and spacewalks it took to build the International Space Station, which has a total price tag of up to $150 billion, depending on who you ask.

When Congress wrote SLS into law in October 2010, SpaceX had only flown the Falcon 9 once. Prior to that, the company went two-for-five on Falcon 1 flights. At that point, politicians were busy debating whether private companies could even be trusted to supply the International Space Station after the shuttle retired. They certainly weren't going to let NASA outsource heavy lift rocket construction!

Eight years later, it's clear that the private sector model can work—just look at SpaceX, which launched its fiftieth Falcon 9 this week, or Blue Origin, which is flying reusable, suborbital rockets while gearing up for orbital flights from Florida. So a better question for USA Today might have been: Why does SLS exist today, now that we have Falcon Heavy? NASA's technical justification is that its deep space plans currently require a payload mass and volume capacity only SLS can provide. The upcoming Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a small, Moon-orbiting space station, has modules that must be co-launched with Orion, which will be used to insert them into the correct lunar orbit.

Could you tweak the LOP-G design to make it compatible with slightly less powerful rockets, like Falcon Heavy? Of course. This is the stuff space enthusiasts love to debate. It's fun to fall down the rabbit hole and talk about fairing sizes, upper stage specific impulses, and the mass capabilities of current and future commercial vehicles. Again, this is the easy problem! The hard problem is politics.

The central premise of the USA Today piece—Get NASA out of the rocket business—was attempted in 2010, when the Obama administration tried to trade in Constellation for commercial rockets and technology development programs. But there was no coalition outside the White House to defend the changes, Congress was resentful over the rollout, and the void left by Constellation mixed badly with anxiety over the end of the shuttle program—particularly at southern U.S. NASA centers.

As Omar Little says in The Wire, You come at the king, you best not miss. The Obama administration missed, and Constellation became the Space Launch System and Orion. So here's a more interesting angle future SLS pieces could explore: How would an administration come at SLS and not miss?