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Where No Woman Has Gone Before

14 Comments

It looks like Polaris Dawn is finally about to launch.

Everyone has noted that this will be the highest-altitude flight since Apollo, but all of the Apollo astronauts were men. Menon and Gillis will hold the altitude record for women after this, until a woman goes to the moon (which may or not be on Artemis, given the ongoing boondoggle).

[Update a while later]

Bob Zimmerman has thoughts on the latest SLS fiasco.

[Wednesday-afternoon update]

14 thoughts on “Where No Woman Has Gone Before”

  1. NASA can’t build rockets, nor mobile launcher.
    Can NASA send crew to the Moon?
    The best have fled NASA to build rockets in private sector. Or they simply wanted to build rockets and go to Mars- or something.
    But it’s stupid for NASA to build rockets, and they don’t need this talent to put crew on the Moon, NASA needs governmental talent.

  2. As I opined on Twitter, there are likely less than four million dollars of steel in a stupid, reinforced tower. Someone stated that the world’s most expensive skyscraper is still cheaper.

  3. Regarding ML-2… I thought the original 600 million was absurd.

    Were the old Saturn/shuttle mobile launchers (the actual crawler bases) not viable for reuse? If not, could they not use one of the kind built for really massive earth-movers (drags, I think they call them)?

    And why not build ML-1 for both SLS versions, via adaptable umbilical arms? That way, the refit for block 2 would have been minimal.

    Seems to me that the ML-2 situation is actually a perfect fit for the rest of the SLS program – an absurd boondoggle.

    1. CT-2 was modified to support Artemis and was used for the EM-1 launch in 2022. CT-1 was going to be leased to Orbital ATK for their OmegA launcher, but that rocket was canned and the plans dropped.

    2. ML1 was built for the Ares I rocket and could barely be retrofited to support the much heavier SLS Block 1.
      Supporting Block 1B with its heavier umbilicals, larger LH2 GSE plumbing and much heavier upper stage and Block 2 with even heavier SRBs would be out of the question without effectively a complete rebuild, at which point you’re better off starting clean slate on an SLS purpose built ML, which ended up being ML2.
      That also gets you the benefit of not having to wait four years after the last Block 1 flight for the ML rebuild to be finished until you can launch the first Block 1B.
      Instead you can start building the Block 1B/2 ML while you’re launching Block 1 and by the time you’re done with that you can start preparing the first Block 1B almost immediately, which was the primary reason NASA leadership pitched the idea to Congress back in 2017/2018, they wanted to get rid of that four year iron bar in the SLS manifest.

  4. Hey, people who work for Bechtel need to eat too and eat and eat and eat.

    It is really hard to be upset at this point because none of it is surprising, its all normal, and while a massive waste of money, the debt has grown so much that SLS costs are insignificant.

  5. Stand-down both today and tomorrow due to bad weather in recovery locations should there be the need for an abort.

  7. On Zimmerman’s story, the mobile launcher is estimated by the Inspector General’s office to eventually cost $2.7 billion. That’s the ballpark cost of Starship/Superheavy development right there. It isn’t even remotely serious when the vehicle merely to move SLS costs as much as development of the competition does.

    1. That isn’t remotely close to the development cost of Starship/Superheavy.
      SpaceX have been spending >$2B (about as much as the total ML2 project cost) per year to develop that system and it doesn’t sound like that development is reaching completion any time soon.

  8. I don’t like saying it, but the next American to land on the Moon may very well go there as a guest on a Chinese mission. And president Harris will express great gratitude, and thank Veep Berz for his negotiating skills.

    (of course Starship might be able to beat the Chinese back if SpaceX were given less than the cost of the SLS launch tower, but the development framing that is contingent on SLS may become too far baked in, even at the HLS level. Well…I could be wrong.)

  9. I think we should put up signs with $ amounts for each level of ML-2.
    Likely for a very short lived rocket program. The Tower of Dower.

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