23 thoughts on “EM-1”

1. If it’s true that’s completely crazy. After all the onerous requirements put in place with Commercial Crew after the Shuttle accident one would think they would retain some modicum of concern about safety. I mean they don’t need to overdo it, but even a satellite operator wouldn’t want to be on the first flight of a vehicle. Let alone send people in it.

   1. I wonder if we’ll see an astronaut revolt. It’s not as if NASA is going to be the only place they can work.

      1. I’m sure they’d have no problem finding volunteers with “the right stuff.”

         1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVxfJYw59cM

            1. I always take a blast before I take off. Otherwise I wouldn’t get into the thing….

            2. “Is that a crash helmet?” “Oh, I hope not…”

2. I would man the first launch with the NASA administrators who decided the first launch should be manned. In astronaut speak – “You first.”

   Or could they use astronauts with terminal cancer for the first launch, perhaps even children from the Make-a-Wish foundation?

   Then, if the launch spectacularly fails, NASA could tell Congress “Well, they were going to die anyway, and we got useful data from the launch attempt.”

   1. “They going to die anyway” is the can’t fail excuse. Sort of like the politicians, “It would have been much worse with the other guy.”

3. Didn’t realize the S in SLS stood for spam?

   Suicidal Launcher of Spam.

4. Sounds like another example of the politicized safety ethic common at NASA. Spare no expense protecting the political masters from public embarrassment until something needs to happen by a deadline. Then suddenly safety isn’t that important any more.

5. I guess failure is not an option after all.

6. Is this mission similar to that of Rogue-1?

   1. Lot of talk about doing some sort of cislunar cycler, they should just launch parts of that.

   2. It sounds more like NASA’s Soyuz-1 to me.

7. Just so it doesn’t slip by, note how the NY Times spins the lie that Trump wanted astronauts on the first SLS flight.

   1. How do you know it’s a lie?

      1. Two reasons: He never said that. They never said that when they were considering it. We’ve all read the reports because Rand has been covering it.

         I can easily imagine him saying “I’d like to see it.” But it’s never been published that he did and if so it wouldn’t mean what the NYT is trying to imply.

         If the NYT and others weren’t spinning like maniacs I’d give them more slack.

         1. The Times’ piece says that the study was conducted “at the request of the Trump administration.” Can you point to a source contradicting that?

            1. The issue isn’t whether they requested a study, but whether they requested the mission. The headline implies that they did, when there is no evidence for it.

8. From the OP: “It this is true, it’s outrageously hypocritical.”

   NASA has now decided against crewing EM-1 — but ostensibly on the grounds of cost rather than safety. So, that means, I believe, that the charge of hypocrisy is alive and well, unless of course NASA now softens its safety standards for commercial crew.

9. Speck’s article says EM-2 is scheduled for 2021, Foust quotes Gerstenmaier saying August 2021 but “it will probably move somewhere to the right”, and Gebhardt says 2023.

   I imagine that is contingent on EM-1 being successful.

10. From Eric Berger’s last link, Yet the evidently shrewd short-term decision to hold crew off the maiden flight of the SLS rocket could not mask a larger political problem that NASA has grappled with for nearly this entire decade. Simply, it has been tasked with building a massive, complicated rocket that it can’t really afford.

    How can they not afford to build a rocket having spent $10+ billion already? NASA has always had plenty of money, they just didn’t manage the process efficiently.

    We always hear the excuse that they just needed a couple hundred million more every year and everything would be great. But you could have given NASA an extra billion a year and SLS still wouldn’t be done. Funding is clearly not the issue and neither is technology. It’s management, institutional culture, congressional dictates, and procurement regulations.

    Since none of things are likely to change, NASA shouldn’t be in the rocket building industry. And since the same problems apply to their other possible projects, they shouldn’t be building much of anything. Everything should be done like the COTS programs.

11. “…this is an ‘and’ proposition; it is not an ‘or’ proposition,”

    …because this dim bulb says so? Apparently the word unjustified is not part of their vocabulary.

    Ironically, if private enterprise is successful, it may create markets for SLS class launch vehicles (although never for SLS itself because of cost.) If that market does develop, will the lying politicians be able to use that to keep SLS going?

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