The Falcon Heavy might be mothballed

The latest on Teslarati concerns NASA's upcoming Roman telescope. Therein is a recent (non)history of the Falcon Heavy.

I learn here that whilst we've all been cheering the Falcon 9 and rooting for muh starship - which is SuperHeavy - in between them, the Falcon Heavy hasn't been flying... at all. It's been three years since the last flight. Various proposals have come up about pushing big cargo to (say) Uranus but the proposals haven't left the boardroom, or the cargo is delayed. Nothing has been loaded upon this actual rocket.

It looks like an old story at NASA: it costs so much to launch, that the mission doesn't have failure as a mode. This by contrast with SpaceX, who are happy to fail if an engineering or process lesson can be taken from the failure. Falcon Heavy, I suspect, doesn't reuse all its boosters, sticking NASA with the bill for the junk.

The Roman looks good for Falcon Heavy on account it's almost a freebee - for NASA, anyway. Some glowing spooks at the National Reconnaissance Office had built the thing as an Earth-facing Hubble. This means we already paid for it. NRO have been using Rocket Lab lately, but this cargo is too big for them. Apparently the 3LAs don't want this monster anymore so it's off to our favourite 4LA for a little tweaking and then launch on a man's rocket.

Or maybe a lot of tweaking. Zim scoffs at the whole project, deeming it a "job program". Some red flags I detect are the linkage with the Webb telescope and the exorbitant tag on the launch.

Launch date is set for October 2026. By then though... could NASA bargain for a lower price, by abandoning the Falcon Heavy and loading it on the SuperHeavy?