“We don’t launch until it’s right,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in remarks on NASA TV about half an hour after the scrub. “It’s just illustrative that this is a very complicated machine.”
Ya think?
I was always amused when NASA would say that the Shuttle was “the most complex machine in the world,” as though that was a point of pride. One of the many stupid things about the SLS design is that it uses hydrogen from sea level to orbit. Shuttle was down for weeks once with a pesky hydrogen leak. This concept combines all of the worst features of the Shuttle with none of the best. But, hey, it creates lots of jobs.
I’ve only read the summary so far, but this may be the most forward-looking document on space that I’ve ever seen come from the federal government. It explicitly states that the national goal should be the development and settlement of space (it was edited by Pete Garretson). And note what doesn’t appear in the report: SLS. 😄
I’m cited in the report twice, and I may be doing some consulting for General Butow in the fall. DIU is expected to get a nice budget boost in October (unless there’s a CR), because they impressed the brass in Ukraine.
As we approach the first flight on Monday (if it doesn’t turn out to be the second wet dress rehearsal that they probably should have run), Eric Berger has thoughts.
But whether the flight is successful or not, Artemis is not a serious program. I disagree with John Logsdon, though:
The lander will also require multiple refuelings en route to make the journey to the lunar surface. That will “require four or five or six launches to put the fuel into orbit,” noted John Logsdon, founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, adding that means “a lot of places for failure.”
If a propellant launch fails, you do another one. No big deal.
I agree. And I think that the notion that using periods makes you sound angry is nutty.
I once suggested to a young woman with whom I was having an email exchange that she would make herself stand out from her peers by abjuring the exclamation marks.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oops, sorry. I hadn’t read the whole thing, and didn’t realize that most of it was paywalled. But if you subscribe to the Dispatch (as I don’t), I’m sure it’s an interesting read.