NASA's Replacement for the Shuttle Likely to be Delayed Due Lack of Funding

There's always the Chinese.

The Chinese do not have launch facilities in the correct position to send crewed missions to the ISS. As for other possible ventures, unless they see it as enhancing their national prestige, don't expect them to cooperate without massive amounts of cash thrown in their direction.

ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE​

There's always blue origin.

So the launch was supposed to be Monday early morning but was scrubbed for a stuck valve (one that they couldn't test during the wet dress rehearsal because of some other issue). Next launch window is tomorrow morning, IIRC.

I don't particularly like the SLS. If it were just about the money it'd be bad enough. But not only is it an enormous monetary spend, it's also expending storied rocket engines with plenty of life left in them. All of the RS-25 engines have flown on multiple shuttle missions. All but 3 or 4 of the SRB segments have flown before. Such an expensive, well-tested system getting destroyed on every launch -- none of it is going to be recovered except the capsule, and none of it refurbished, not even the SRBs -- is a tragedy. It's a destruction of national wealth.

Saturday at 11:17am your time.

Thanks, didn't know about the windows on 9/3 and 9/4.

If the launch doesn't happen by the 5th, they'll have to roll it back to the VAB to replace the batteries in the launch escape system.

I was hoping to watch the launch as it happens, but I have plans during the day on Saturday and won't be near a television. I set my DVR to record for four hours around the launch time in case there's a delay.

This podcast has an interview with former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, who was not a fan of the SLS while she was at NASA.



She mentions the internal politics (as well as those with Congress) that basically foisted the SLS on NASA, but a good chunk of the blame can be put on the Clinton Administration ( ). They decided that they didn't want to do business with as many defense contractors, so a whole bunch of them merged together (as you might recall). This means that there's effectively little competition, so there's a whole lotta nothing that can be done when someone (like Boeing) screws the pooch.

I know the argument can be made we should just let Musk do it, but that's honestly not any better than just having Boeing do it. Sure, right now SpaceX has a decent track record, but as we've seen time and time again, across every industry, when somebody has a monopoly, they quickly take things for granted and just start fucking up. Hell, Boeing didn't start trying to figure out how to improve the Delta rocket series until other private companies started looking at building rockets.

What we really need, IMHO, is another President with the vision of LBJ. He got the idea that the space program could be used to switch the Military Industrial Complex from producing weapons (which encourages wars) to spacecraft, which offers huge benefits to society, and doesn't involve blowing people up enmasse.

They’re filling the tanks!

There’s a leak of the hydrogen that they’re trying to patch. Launch is 6 hours away if they can solve the leak.

Less than 3 hours to go and it looks like they're going to try.

It's a scrub.

*ahem*

http://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/to-the-moon.122935/

October is the next attempt.

Here's an interview with one of the astronauts who was involved with developing the SLS where he explains the reasons for this:



The short answer is that by giving up on reusability NASA is able to put larger payloads into space (since you don't need to worry about things like parachutes), that if they didn't reuse the stuff, then it would likely have been sold for scrap, and that they don't have the added expense of sending ships out to fish the stuff out of the ocean (which would be farther away from the coast than it was with the shuttle, so more fuel costs), so they can do more off-Earth than on-Earth. Additionally, when you factor in inflation costs, each SLS launch is cheaper than a Saturn V. He also says that there are plans to use the SLS longer than has been reported. Apparently, there's engines at the design stage that are lighter and better performing than the ones the SLS is using and the plan is that once the current batch of shuttle engines that they're using are gone, they'll have the next-gen engines ready to go. We'll see if that's true or not.