Oh I don’t know. When it comes to national disgraces, we have the COVID response, CHAZ, the Geo. Floyd riots and now possibly the Hurricane Helene response that cause SLS to pale in comparison.
But I wonder what would happen to NASA if it just decided one day not to procure anything from the money earmarked for SLS by Congress? Who’d get impeached? Now that’s a hearing I’d love to watch….
NASA/congress won’t cancel SLS, due to having squandered so many billions on it.
However, I do think there’s a way to save the SLS program, and actually make it useful and vastly less expensive.
The solution, unsurprisingly, is a fusion between SpaceX and NASA technology. To make this work, SpaceX needs to make a massive change to Starship/Superheavy, via renaming it to Starship Launch System. Must has changed Starship’s name before, and I’m confident that it’s possible to do so again, to Starship Launch System (abbreviated as SLS).
As for NASA’s technical contribution, NASA brings to the table one, and only one, non-terrible contribution; the #JourneyToMars hashtag. Musk, who owns Twitter and thus its technical staff, is probably capable of incorporating that hashtag into SpaceX’s twitter account.
I think this would work, because when it comes to government programs, semantics is always more important than engineering or economics.
The disgrace is government program mismanagement – not just NASA (when was the last project they delivered that was actually on time and on budget?), the DoD (The Navy’s ship building, the AF KC-46 tanker project, the Army Artillery system, the Marines amphibious trucks). There is nothing the government does that is on time or budget: There is no compelling reason for the government workers, or contractors, to make it happen: They will not lose their jobs. In fact, with increased budgets come increased GS-levels and ‘performance’ bonuses
Oh I don’t know. When it comes to national disgraces, we have the COVID response, CHAZ, the Geo. Floyd riots and now possibly the Hurricane Helene response that cause SLS to pale in comparison.
But I wonder what would happen to NASA if it just decided one day not to procure anything from the money earmarked for SLS by Congress? Who’d get impeached? Now that’s a hearing I’d love to watch….
Oh and how could I forget the withdrawal from Afghanistan? That alone set the world on the path to peaceful co-existence…
That’s a superb article IMHO.
NASA/congress won’t cancel SLS, due to having squandered so many billions on it.
However, I do think there’s a way to save the SLS program, and actually make it useful and vastly less expensive.
The solution, unsurprisingly, is a fusion between SpaceX and NASA technology. To make this work, SpaceX needs to make a massive change to Starship/Superheavy, via renaming it to Starship Launch System. Must has changed Starship’s name before, and I’m confident that it’s possible to do so again, to Starship Launch System (abbreviated as SLS).
As for NASA’s technical contribution, NASA brings to the table one, and only one, non-terrible contribution; the #JourneyToMars hashtag. Musk, who owns Twitter and thus its technical staff, is probably capable of incorporating that hashtag into SpaceX’s twitter account.
I think this would work, because when it comes to government programs, semantics is always more important than engineering or economics.
The disgrace is government program mismanagement – not just NASA (when was the last project they delivered that was actually on time and on budget?), the DoD (The Navy’s ship building, the AF KC-46 tanker project, the Army Artillery system, the Marines amphibious trucks). There is nothing the government does that is on time or budget: There is no compelling reason for the government workers, or contractors, to make it happen: They will not lose their jobs. In fact, with increased budgets come increased GS-levels and ‘performance’ bonuses