Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a "successful wet dress rehearsal" despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface. For reference, the lower flammability limit, and system requirement, is just 4%, beyond which this nightmare fuel can burn and detonate in air.
The "wet dress" was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a "(no) confidence test" on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.
The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they've had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.
Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world's first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS's botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!
Furthermore, we are assured that the engineering on SLS/Orion is so rigorous and the team is so elite that it's totally okay to test fly this turkey with four currently living astronauts on it, not to Low Earth Orbit like some kind of participation trophy Starliner repeat, but all the way around the Moon, on a completely unique, untested configuration.
On the same week that a key SLS contractor's solid fueled booster rocket engine, launching a critical national security payload on a flagship national rocket, managed to explode, for the second time in three flights, for no apparent reason.
I'm going to say it. What do @CAgovernor and @SenTedCruz have in common? They both want to be President and they both will apparently go to the hilt to defend the worst national flagship infrastructure contractors in the history of the entire world. Why are they determined to ally so overtly with such conspicuous losers? What can they possibly be getting from such a raw deal? How can they possibly be so desperate?
We can choose to roll the dice with four lives on Artemis II. If they survive the launch, they can snap some really cool photos with their newly certified iPhones of the Moon shooting by out their window as they follow a trajectory that Apollo 13 took only under extreme duress. They can fulfill Artemis II's (I kid you not) "science objectives" by performing a visual inspection of the Moon that you can do yourself in the comfort of your own backyard with a $200 pair of binoculars.
But when (not if) something goes horribly wrong, I do not want to hear "no-one could have seen this coming" or "we followed a rigorous flight rationale process" or "we checked all the boxes" or "this was the best we could do".
At this point, the safest thing about the SLS and Orion is that they're so FUBARed that it might not even be possible to get them to T-0.
Astronauts and taxpayers deserve far better.
The "wet dress" was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a "(no) confidence test" on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.
The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they've had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.
Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world's first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS's botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!
Furthermore, we are assured that the engineering on SLS/Orion is so rigorous and the team is so elite that it's totally okay to test fly this turkey with four currently living astronauts on it, not to Low Earth Orbit like some kind of participation trophy Starliner repeat, but all the way around the Moon, on a completely unique, untested configuration.
On the same week that a key SLS contractor's solid fueled booster rocket engine, launching a critical national security payload on a flagship national rocket, managed to explode, for the second time in three flights, for no apparent reason.
I'm going to say it. What do @CAgovernor and @SenTedCruz have in common? They both want to be President and they both will apparently go to the hilt to defend the worst national flagship infrastructure contractors in the history of the entire world. Why are they determined to ally so overtly with such conspicuous losers? What can they possibly be getting from such a raw deal? How can they possibly be so desperate?
We can choose to roll the dice with four lives on Artemis II. If they survive the launch, they can snap some really cool photos with their newly certified iPhones of the Moon shooting by out their window as they follow a trajectory that Apollo 13 took only under extreme duress. They can fulfill Artemis II's (I kid you not) "science objectives" by performing a visual inspection of the Moon that you can do yourself in the comfort of your own backyard with a $200 pair of binoculars.
But when (not if) something goes horribly wrong, I do not want to hear "no-one could have seen this coming" or "we followed a rigorous flight rationale process" or "we checked all the boxes" or "this was the best we could do".
At this point, the safest thing about the SLS and Orion is that they're so FUBARed that it might not even be possible to get them to T-0.
Astronauts and taxpayers deserve far better.
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