NASA's Latest Launch Date Guesses For SLS
Years late, billions over budget, and after multiple paint jobs, #NASA says that the latest notional 2022 launch dates for #Artemis 1 are 29 Aug, 2 Sep, and 5 Sep #CaveatEmptor pic.twitter.com/R7AzJM3DTc
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) July 20, 2022
Looks like it should have a delta-winged orbiter on its side.
Wonder if anyone knows what day today is …
My friend’s birthday…and his son’s!
Personally, I’ve come to view December 24, 1968, as marking the more significant historical milestone. Getting down to the surface was an additional and substantial set of serious challenges, and the accomplishment of those small and large steps most definitely deserves recognition and celebration.
It was Borman, Lovell, and Anders’s successfully achieving lunar orbit, however, which precipitated the fundamental change in our collective human consciousness.
The Moon was no longer that unreachable pie in the sky after that Christmas Eve reading from Genesis. The sky-gracing visage of the Moon (and in its phenomenological wake, any given point across the entire Solar System) had transformed for everybody into a place(s), i.e., a destination(s) fully within the bounds of that domain which are defined merely by the depth of our own determination and daring.
clearly the boldest thing that NASA has ever done
The multiple paint jobs comment was a nice touch 😉
After 15 years in development for Orion/MPCV and 10 for the elongated ET, SRBs together with old SSMEs it will be interesting to see whether the Lockheed/Thiokol/NASA industrial complex can get this one off the ground with a minimium of issues.
With all of the exemptions and extensions the SRBs are getting, I’m torn between ‘booster unzipping’ and ‘Boeing software problem’ as the most likely cause of a failure. My heart is going to be in my throat when they finally put astronauts on that thing.
It’s not good, but I doubt the age effects on the boosters are that bad. I’d be more concerned about other hardware issues (like…valves), but going by Starliner, dealing with software and general system architecture (like having events that are dependent on system state be determined entirely by time and then not using the right clock) seem to be their biggest problems.
Well if Congress didn’t mandate NASA to go Shuttle-derived….I wonder if any of your aerospace buffs will write the damning book about the ATK Mafia and how we got here.