Trump is going to order a government-wide review of it.
If Trump really wants to review wasteful government spending, at NASA he can start with SLS/Orion: https://t.co/eR8yiprfgO
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) March 13, 2017
[Update a while later]
Congratulations to Altius Space Machines for their NASA SBIR Phase II win for cryo propellant transfer technology development. If we canceled SLS/Orion, we could found several thousand efforts like this.
Yay, Altius!
I expect NASA will get far better value for their (our) money out of Jon & Co than most places they spend it.
Thanks Rand!
If you and Henry are interested, I had a longer writeup with a few more details over at http://www.altius-space.com/cryo-coupler-sbir-phase-ii-win/
~Jon
Congrats!
That is a good problem to solve.
I do wonder whether the recent kerfuffle about NASA sending astronauts around the Moon before SpaceX was a veiled attempt to justify canceling SLS.
In a word, no: Trump’s budget proposal funds Orion/SLS at $3.7 billion. Did you really think he was going to seriously go after major corporate interests?
More likely the President asked out of genuine curiosity “why don’t we have astronauts on the first flight?” and nobody on his immediate staff knew for sure. So they asked NASA.
Then NASA read far too much into a basic why-do-we-do-it-that-way question and worked itself up into a lather doing a multi-million-dollar study confirming the simple answer they should have given in the first place: Astronauts on the initial flight of a new rocket is a bad idea becuase the odds of astronaut funerals are way too high.
If that’s all it was, NASA could have immediately responded with the explanation you’ve just given. That NASA’s taking a month to study this hare-brained scheme strongly suggests there’s more to it. Given Trump’s predilection for noise and bombast, my guess would be that he simply wants a space spectacular in time for the next election.