NASA admits that it is struggling to meet the 2017 launch date for SLS
Delays in the construction of Orion’s European-built service module as well as cracks in the spacecraft’s heat shield are threatening the planned 2017 launch date for Orion’s first test flight, unmanned, beyond Earth orbit.
Note that this program, costing anywhere from $10 to $20 billion, is only building a handful of capsules for flying three or four test flights. Beyond that, there is no money.
I have predicted this before, and I will predict it again: SLS will never take any humans anywhere. The cost is too high, the bureaucracy too complex, and the schedule is too slow. It will vanish when the new private companies begin flying humans into space in the next three years.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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Delays in the construction of Orion’s European-built service module as well as cracks in the spacecraft’s heat shield are threatening the planned 2017 launch date for Orion’s first test flight, unmanned, beyond Earth orbit.
Note that this program, costing anywhere from $10 to $20 billion, is only building a handful of capsules for flying three or four test flights. Beyond that, there is no money.
I have predicted this before, and I will predict it again: SLS will never take any humans anywhere. The cost is too high, the bureaucracy too complex, and the schedule is too slow. It will vanish when the new private companies begin flying humans into space in the next three years.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
I agree.
I predict Nov 2014 D-H-Orion launch will happen.
2017 mission will happen.
And probably never again. If orion ever launches again, it will be a scaled down version on a Falcon Heavy.
Once falcon heavy is operational, and if SpaceX succeeds with BFR then SLS is dead in the water.
Whatever happened to the NASA of the sixties? Oh yes. They were the can-do remnants of the World War II generation. Now we have the can-not generation in charge.
NASA’s internal documents show EM-1 having slipped to Sept. 30, 2018. NASA also intends to slip in a third unmanned test of SLS after EM-1 and the AA-2 in-flight abort test. This mission, which has no designation yet, would test fly the Exploration Upper Stage, a quad-RL-10 “Centaur on steroids” that NASA wants to use on the first manned flight, EM-2. NASA’s own rules prohibit it from flying people on an untried stage.
Based on SLS’s maximum contemplated flight rate of once every two years, if EM-1 has indeed slipped to 2018, then AA-2 probably can’t go before 2020, the Exploration Upper Stage unmanned test can’t occur before 2022 and EM-2, the first manned mission can’t go until 2024. As Dr. Z correctly points out, commercial providers will have put so many new facts on the ground and in orbit by even 2018 that SLS will be an obviously unaffordable redundancy. Sept. 2018 is also 20 months into the term of President 45 who will likely have cancelled SLS and Orion sometime during the previous year.
I not only don’t see SLS-Orion ever carrying people, I don’t see them ever flying at all. The “Orion” slated to fly atop a Delta IV Heavy this December is barely more than a boilerplate mockup. It will be without most of the systems that would be required for real missions. It won’t have a real service module, for instance, as the ESA is only building two for us and the thing is too heavy for a D-IV Heavy to boost uphill along with the seriously obese Orion. There will also be no life-support hardware aboard. The whole mission is an Ares-1X-like stunt.
Minor correction: “Dr. Z” is incorrect. I have no Phd. I am merely a former film producer who switched to science writing because it focused on achievement rather than making very bad horror films.