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The Coalition For Big Expensive Rockets

14 Comments

I agree with Stephen Fleming about this press release.

I’ve been pointing out all of the nonsensical, engineering-illiterate praise for SLS on Twitter. “Most powerful,” “fastest” etc. I loved this one today:

My response:

14 thoughts on “The Coalition For Big Expensive Rockets”

  1. Why is the illustration marked “(c) NASA”?

    If it’s a government work, it should be in the public domain. Doesn’t NASA’s PR staff receive basic legal training on copyright law?

  3. @Rand;
    Who knew that LOUD was a figure of merit for launch systems?

    In all due fairness to the guy, being LOUD is quite possibly the most meritorious aspect of SLS.

    🙂

  4. You got your work cut out for you, see such brilliant twitterpieces like #slsinspires and @XploreDeepSpace

  5. The key is in the third paragraph:

    “A team across 47 states is diligently working …”

    … to seek out new pork, and new rationalizations — to boldly spend and eliminate competition!

    1. First, you have to get Mr. Shatner to narrate (he is currently promoting the services of a “personal injury” law firm based in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is not a big shift, for this purpose), where he will sound out all of the syllables in “raa-shun-eye-lie-zay-shuns.”

      An the second line needs to be changed to read “to boldly spend and eliminate competition . . . where none has existed before!” (cue vocals with bongo drum accompaniament) “Doooo-wooo, do do do do dooooo.” (woosh) “Doooo-woooooo!, do do do do doooo!” (woosh)

    2. The Saturn V managed to distribute the pork well enough that some went out to all 50 states. Kind of disturbing that even back then they considered that a feature.

      1. It was a feature! Apollo would almost certainly not have happened without LBJ’s political horse wrangling making sure that all the appropriate skids were greased. That’s why Apollo happened despite being a very aggressive, expensive, and risky nominally civilian project. The problem is that doing it the Apollo way, as historical and civilization defining as it was, was probably not the best way. And ever after our manned spaceflight program has been hitched to the same horse team, except without a powerful enough figure in control to keep it heading in a productive direction.

        That’s precisely how we got the Shuttle, and ISS, and now SLS. It’s politically driven projects that are dependent more on where the money is spent than what gets done. That’s why the program has generally been in a consistant out of control spiral of a much lower tangible benefit per dollar from program to program and year to year.

    3. The success of this tactic shows why it has been adopted by new space companies like SpaceX. How many times have you seen a company tout how many states their supply chain winds through?

  6. “At 70 metric tons, NASA’s Space Launch System is the world’s only launch vehicle that has the mass, volume and speed to deliver humans and cargo to deep space faster, safer and more affordably than any existing or proposed alternatives.”

    The SLS can only deliver the cargo to LEO, it would have to lift a EDS to LEO in order to push out further. So the SLS can only deliver to LEO not “deep space”

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