Bob Zimmerman has some thoughts on potential upcoming (and unsurprising, since it doesn’t really matter whether or not it actually flies) schedule slips:
…it means that it will have literally taken NASA two decades to build and fly a single manned Orion capsule, beginning when George Bush ordered the construction of the Crew Exploration Vehicle in January 2004.
Plenty of time to take it behind the barn and put it out of its misery.
It’s not really a success unless they can not fly it for 30 years!
It seems to me that the only real problem with SLS involves launching it. So, the easy fix to save the program would be to simply remove that particular goal from the list, and carry on?
Bingo!
The objective was always perpetual pork, anyway. Flights are a dangerous distraction.
The logic of the idea is impeccable. Highly skilled and educated engineers can still afford to put their kids through graduate school without risking billions of dollars of hardware on some dangerous and stupid idea of actual space flight. Everybody wins except the tax payers. Since they were getting screwed anyway, it’s a no brainer.
Reminds me of this scene from the first Robocop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyvHqYu_KXI&feature=youtu.be&t=92
Dunno if you guys watched this one. Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium:
http://livestream.com/accounts/563450/events/6533675
WARNING for the faint of heart: the Cook and MG are in it. It’s still worth a watch though.
Good news: SLS will keep its perfect safety record; bad news: it’s by never launching people. What a fiasco, what a waste of years and effort.
As for this particular news item it isn’t particularly unexpected. Heck I’ve said it here more than once that the Delta IV upper stage is an abortion meant to provide us with a Potemkin launch.
Between that, discarding SSMEs, and using segmented solids, there is not a lot that can be salvaged from SLS. Arguably the only meaningful tech effort was the J-2X and that got cancelled. It’s a lot of pork for little benefit. Michoud got operational again and NASA still has their large diameter tank facilities operational. That’s about it.