So Long SLS? (And Gateway, Orion, Artemis?)
Empty launch pads
NASAWatch
Keith’s note: According to Ars Technica: “On Friday, with less than an hour’s notice, David Dutcher, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the SLS rocket, scheduled an all-hands meeting for the approximately 800 employees working on the program. The apparently scripted meeting lasted just six minutes, and Dutcher didn’t take questions.” Oh yes: Eric Berger just update this story with a tweet saying “NASA HQ was caught completely unaware on Friday afternoon when the first stories started to appear. Boeing apparently did this to pressure lawmakers to ‘save’ SLS before the White House takes action.”
One response to “So Long SLS? (And Gateway, Orion, Artemis?)”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Bye bye, SLS and most likely Orion and Artemis (as configured). Sorry but I am not shedding any tears for ya. SLS was the Senate Launch System, created to save the Shuttle jobs from the start to keep the Space States happy. Artemis was a program created to justify the 10’s of billions spent on SLS and Orion in spite of the fact they forgot to build a Lunar Lander. It just was never properly thought out as a sane long term vision. Kind of an Apollo en-enactment without any plans on how to expand it beyond another flag planting and take some selfies.
Orion as a crew capsule for New Glenn is still a possibility. It solves plenty of issues for Blue quickly and also allows them time to develop a crew solution. Let’s see how many times NG can launch in 2025 and if they can land the 1st stage and re-fly it within 12-18 months?
At the usual historic BO pace this might take years. Let’s see if BO has actually changed? Blue’s 2nd stage is very capable but it might be a bit of overkill for LEO missions while being rather expensive. I am not sure exactly how many non-LEO missions there are for that type of rocket? I am interested to see how many Kuiper satellites can be launched in 1 NG launch.
Blue knows SX isn’t standing still. Starship will have 2 launch towers most likely operational in 3-6 months and 3 within 18 months. I do expect Starship’s 2nd stage to be caught by this summer and the 1st flight with re-used hardware before 2026. Orbital refueling needs to work 100% from the jump. They can’t have huge explosions in LEO but then with 3 launch towers and by then they will be cranking out a whole bunch of rockets. Test flights to Moon/Mars should be on the agenda.
I do wish Musk would just stick to engineering and away for politics but that is not happening. As with most relationships with T, they usually eventually melt down. If Musk thought he had issues with Biden if the T relationship melts down everything could come to a sudden halt. The real danger for SX is political not technical. Musk is forming quite powerful enemies in the US Government and T is going bye-bye after 28.