Curious about the comparison, as ‘Men from Planet Earth’ set Lunar foot 21 months after the first test flight of the Apollo-Saturn system. SLS is projected to put people in position to maybe land on the Moon 8 years after the first test flight. If SLS was on the Apollo test regime, it seems we’d be there, already.

If Marshall said that first, it was the young and vigorous Marshall of the Moon Race era and not the elderly and demented Marshall of today, drooling on its bib and barely able to remember its name, never mind what it said 60 years ago. But then Marshall and its contractors could actually build hardware quickly enough in those days to allow for a decent test campaign and not just a single unmanned flight. If SLS was subjected to the same development flight regime as Saturn V, we wouldn’t be sending anyone Moonward sooner than the mid-2040s.

But, as Yoda famously said, “There is another.”

One fallout from IFT-10 was how flummoxed the CFD people were over SuperHeavy’s performance.

One of the reasons I advocated for an Energiya/Buran type Shuttle-2 was that the orbiter was just one of many payloads.

Hypersonic test articles, spacecraft simulators with tiles, etc….all these could have been used for flight tests.

I NEVER trusted CFD for spaceflight. I don’t much trust computer models for climate research or anything else for that matter.

Starship doesn’t impress me, but SuperHeavy does–it really did show up the experts with its “bumblebees can’t fly but they do” moment.

Large scale test flights are the only way to go. Marshall said that first.