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Except SLS/Orion should be cancelled. The SLS is pejoratively called the Senate Launch System, because it has no real place in the market yet is continuing to c

Except SLS/Orion should be cancelled. The SLS is pejoratively called the Senate Launch System, because it has no real place in the market yet is continuing to consume tens of billions of dollars. It was mostly obsoleted by Falcon Heavy years ago (SLS has been a black hole of funding since 2011), and its costs are completely ridiculous. You're looking at billions of dollars per launch if it ever is confidently flight ready. And mind you it's not some amazing technological marvel that's driving these ridiculous costs. It's essentially a really expensive refactoring of the Space Shuttle program to the point that it will be using the literally exact same rs-25 engines. And you already hit exactly on why they're not being cancelled - there's going to be a very short degree of separation between Congressmen and the people charging absurd costs for simple tech that's being used in this project. To me, this is perhaps the purest embodiment (and reason) for governmental dysfunction, at all levels. It's simple pork and corruption.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
Need some competition to commercial near-monopolization (in the pre-to-mid 2010s when it was funded), some other program, they already funded SLS (which was funded to carry way more payload than FH), let it play out, IMO. Also, not to say it isn't a time to start acting, if we are another decade out still adding funding to SLS with the current balance sheet, we have major issues. But $30B over 10Y isn't that crazy when we spend ~$900B a year (with much more in 2026) on defense.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  This is the definition of throwing good money after bad. Even if SLS can be completed, it just has no purpose. The latest "estimates" (which means will likely be well below what actually happens) put the recurring per launch costs of SLS at $2.5 billion per launch, on top of the ongoing tens of billions in development costs. That's for a system that is aiming for an initial payload of 95k kg (to LEO). By contrast the Falcon Heavy costs $0.097 billion per launch and can send 57k kg to orbit. So in other words, 1 SLS launch will costs more than 25 Falcon Heavy launches, with a payload capacity that's 67% greater.
  - saulpw 1y ago
    How about as a backup in case all other current options are unavailable?
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      It's difficult to imagine any scenario where this happens. The only real possibilities are SpaceX going bankrupt or leaving the country. In either case, the government has substantial capacity to nationalize companies for the sake of national security during times of crises. It's also likely impossible for SpaceX to leave the US owing to ITAR and other regulations.
      - riffraff 1y ago
        What about SpaceX deciding to raise the price 30 times because they no longer have any potential competition? I don't believe that likely, but it does seem like something similar is a good reason to keep options open.
        zamadatix 1y ago
        I'm sure SpaceX would be more than willing to sign a non-exclusive no-minimums fixed-price-per-launch (based on mass/orbit/etc) indefinite contract for any types of missions the SLS could hope to do. This type of contract isn't even new to NASA (or SpaceX), it's just the policy says "competition" like SLS has to exist and be funded too. The two main stated aims of fostering competition are contingencies for any single provider and hopes that funding competition lowers cost in the long term (which is separate from preventing cost from going up). I used to be much more supportive of this policy... but nowadays I find myself on the fence. It's hard for me to believe however many billions of dollars we funnel into SLS per launch will ever result in cheap alternatives being developed. It may even have the opposite effect of "SLS got funded through all of its overruns on this policy, we should have no problems doing it again". On the contingency side it's a bit harder to navigate... but it's starting to feel like programs like SLS don't produce realistic alternatives anyways so how much of a contingency is it really providing to fund things like that.
georgeburdell 1y ago
Your point was stronger 6 months ago before SpaceX started regressing on their Starship test flights. The U.S. needs to have multiple horses in the race
- somenameforme 1y ago
  I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. And I'm contrasting this against SLS cost "projections", which invariably end up lowballing reality. I'm steel-manning the argument for the SLS as much as I can, but it's still just nonsensical. The idea we need to compete against ourselves is something that came straight from Boeing after they lost their bid for commercial crew, leading to them to use their connections to Congress to force NASA to make an unprecedented decision to give bids to 2 different companies. SpaceX succeeded at commercial crew putting astronauts on the ISS in 2020. Boeing, by contrast, was allowed to skip parts of the testing phase (for Commercial Crew), failed others, and was still greenlit because of corruption. And that's precisely how you ended up with the two astronauts put on their first human launch stranded on the ISS for months, only to end up getting rescued by SpaceX. It's a nonsensical argument - we didn't create two Apollo programs, because there's no justification. And in any case, Boeing is clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a "horse" for this race. Instead we get a 3-legged mule sold at 5-time Kentucky Derby winner thoroughbred prices.
  - ginko 1y ago
    >I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - adastra22 1y ago
      It is enough payload.
mjamesaustin 1y ago
The real tragedy is that the administration withdrew Jared Isaacman's nomination to be NASA administrator. He had bold plans for modernizing NASA and the experience to lead. But he didn't kiss the ring and instead made comments suggesting NASA's budget shouldn't be eviscerated, so his appointment was torpedoed.
- 7e 1y ago
  A tragedy avoided given his close ties to SpaceX and Musk, which would have been inappropriate at best and corruption at worst.
  - wordofx 1y ago
    Just because Elon knows people doesn’t make it automatic corruption.
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    The space industry is still pretty small, insiders naturally know one another and have professional contacts.
    - aredox 1y ago
      RFK jr. is destroying all US public health institutions for less "insiderism" than that.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    He is a paying customer of SpaceX. Where’s the corruption?
- somenameforme 1y ago
  The administrator is definitely one of the weakest links in the system. Bridenstine was looking amazing for NASA then at one point he did a hard 180 and suddenly just became an unthinking Boeing cheerleader, and is largely responsible for the catastrophe that is Boeing's Starliner. And then as soon as he left office he suddenly is in a senior advisory role for some military industrial complex orgs, probably pulling 7 figures for a Zoom call now and then. But Isaacman? Well he's already a billionaire, and highly ideological towards progress in space. Yeah 0 chance he gets appointed.
gonzobonzo 1y ago
Manned space flight in generally is a hugely wasteful money sink. It eats up about 50% of NASA's budget, and there's no real reason for it other than "we're putting people into space because we want to put people into space." People vigorously defend these boondoggles, then finally admit they were a huge waste years after the fact (as we've seen with the space shuttle, and as we're now starting to see with the SLS).
- esseph 1y ago
  Idk, absolutely does fucking not at all look wasteful: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-20-years-of-science-aboard-the-international-space-station/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-...
  - gonzobonzo 1y ago
    > Idk, absolutely does fucking not at all look wasteful It does if you actually look into at the facts instead of just taking a PR listicle at face value. For instance, the very first thing mentioned on that list is Alzheimer's. Go ahead and look into what the ISS actually did with regards to Alzheimer's, and you see a lot of "this has the potential to teach us more about the disease," without any evidence that anything was ever learned. There's a reason why you don't hear researcher's working on these diseases go "well, we expect a huge breakthrough once this ISS experiment is done!" This is the problem every time this gets discussed. People just run a Gish Gallop of copying and pasting a big list of vague claims from the NASA PR department, without bothering to look at the actual claims to see if they're accurate. When you do, they're invariably far less than they're made out to be.
    - esseph 1y ago
      So many of the things we use today on a daily basis came from having a manned space program. It used to be that in the 1960s we were spending about 4.4% of the total federal budget on the space program. Since the 1970s, it's gone down to around 0.71%. Since the 2010s, it's gone down even further to 0.3% - 0.4%. We've also not pushed much for talent in the federal government by way of salary and perks. Despite these challenges, there are a whole host of technologies, medical treatments, navigational advancements, etc. we would not have without simply being in space. Even accounting for inflation adjusted dollars, the amount total spent in the history of NASA, across all programs, is absolutely miniscule to the technological and economic advancements that have come from it. There are around 1,600 published papers with data from the ISS, and those have been collectively cited over 14,000 times by other papers. That is a significant impact and can only be done by having people there.
throwawaysleep 1y ago
SLS is what keeps Elon from having American spaceflight in his own personal vice.
rsynnott 1y ago
> It was mostly obsoleted by Falcon Heavy years ago (SLS has been a black hole of funding since 2011), and its costs are completely ridiculous Falcon Heavy: Claimed payload to LEO (though it has never done anything like this): 63 tonnes. SLS: 95t, 105t or 130t depending on version. These are quite different capabilities.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  The need for such large payloads is highly disputable, especially for propellant (which is most of the mass of any space mission). This is why the congressional porkmeisters have been so adamant about NASA not developing in-space propellant storage and transfer.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > The need for such large payloads is highly disputable Getting mass to orbit is one thing. The real game is "get masses into orbit and back to Earth", with the "mass" in question being either some sort of explosive, troops, ammunition or tanks. When you don't need to have troops and vehicles distributed across the globe (which is very expensive to maintain) but can just go and ship them off with heavy rockets, the math on warfare shifts drastically.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      Let me express great skepticism here as to the economics of this. Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        > Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1]. > And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS. Not for SLS... but for SpaceX with Starship. The USSF plans a demo flight for 2026 [2]. And militarily, this capacity is definitely worth it. 100 tons of cargo, delivered to any place in the world that has a suitable landing facility in one hour of flight time. There's absolutely nothing that can come close to this kind of logistic capability, and there is no competitor in sight. It would be an absolute edge over Russia, China or anyone else who thinks they can wage war against the US or whomever the US thinks is worthy enough of its protection. [1] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-military-handling-fuel-afghan-forces/ https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Cargo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Cargo
sandworm101 1y ago
>> Senate Launch System A name also thrown around for shuttle. Do a little digging and a surprising number of shuttle crews had ties to the US congress, either as relatives or who themselves would later become representatives. They even flew a handful of serving reps (ie John Glenn, aged 77). Nasa has always known how to foster relations with political power families.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  > or who themselves would later become representatives. That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.
  - sandworm101 1y ago
    Or they were from well-connected political families. The path for wealthy sons of academy ... elite military job ... politics, is well worn. Someone like John Maccain could easily be identified as a future political leader. He would have been a prime nasa candidate if not injured.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      Go look at the resumes of astronauts, particularly before modern DEI stuff. For instance here [1] is Buzz Aldrin. A-student in school, varsity football center for a state championship team. Graduated third in his class at West Point with a degree of mechanical engineering while also competing in track and field. Enlisted in the Air Force as a combat fighter pilot where he saw plentiful [successful] combat including dog fighting. Enrolled at MIT and earned a doctorate in astronautics. His thesis was "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous, the dedication of which read: "In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!" He then began work as an engineer on Project Gemini. He then applied to become an astronaut and was rejected because he had not passed test pilot qualifications. He sought a waiver, and was rejected. Fortuitously for him, the next round of astronauts NASA sought required being a test pilot or having at least 1000 hours of flying time in a jet. He had more than 2,200 hours in jets alone. And at that point, he applied again, and was accepted. --- McCain [2] - prep school (where he at least wrestled), graduated from the US Naval Academy ranked 894 of 899 students. Completed flight school where he was regarded as careless and reckless, having crashed his craft multiple times. He then requested a combat assignment. The first carrier he was on caught fire killing hundreds shortly after he arrived. He moved to another carrier and was shot down and captured a couple of months later. Not exactly "The Right Stuff." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_edu... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_edu...
ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
Just to add to this, somehow the current plan for getting to the moon involves over 15 launches (or 25, the number does seem to vary). With Starship actually having a larger payload than the Saturn V at least to LEO, how 15 launches could possibly be required, and such a plan been approved to spend billions of dollars on, I just don't know. So as much as I like the idea of NASA, something needs to be done there.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  They got it down to 15 launches? Excellent news. The starship refueling in LEO requiring multiple fuel starships is not advantages from a mass perspective...
- filoeleven 1y ago
  Destin from Smarter Every Day put up a video of a talk he gave at NASA about this program, focusing on all the problems that nobody's talking about. It's a great watch and a good example of how to say the hard things to the people who need to hear them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
  - ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
    That's the one I watched and then fact checked after because I couldn't believe it. Quite frankly, 15 launches should have never been submitted let alone approved. That it was approved and billions burned already is an obvious sign that something is wrong at NASA.
Arubis 1y ago
Senate Launch System sounds more appealing every day. All aboard!

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago

Need some competition to commercial near-monopolization (in the pre-to-mid 2010s when it was funded), some other program, they already funded SLS (which was funded to carry way more payload than FH), let it play out, IMO. Also, not to say it isn't a time to start acting, if we are another decade out still adding funding to SLS with the current balance sheet, we have major issues. But $30B over 10Y isn't that crazy when we spend ~$900B a year (with much more in 2026) on defense.

somenameforme 1y ago
This is the definition of throwing good money after bad. Even if SLS can be completed, it just has no purpose. The latest "estimates" (which means will likely be well below what actually happens) put the recurring per launch costs of SLS at $2.5 billion per launch, on top of the ongoing tens of billions in development costs. That's for a system that is aiming for an initial payload of 95k kg (to LEO). By contrast the Falcon Heavy costs $0.097 billion per launch and can send 57k kg to orbit. So in other words, 1 SLS launch will costs more than 25 Falcon Heavy launches, with a payload capacity that's 67% greater.
- saulpw 1y ago
  How about as a backup in case all other current options are unavailable?
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    It's difficult to imagine any scenario where this happens. The only real possibilities are SpaceX going bankrupt or leaving the country. In either case, the government has substantial capacity to nationalize companies for the sake of national security during times of crises. It's also likely impossible for SpaceX to leave the US owing to ITAR and other regulations.
    - riffraff 1y ago
      What about SpaceX deciding to raise the price 30 times because they no longer have any potential competition? I don't believe that likely, but it does seem like something similar is a good reason to keep options open.
      - zamadatix 1y ago
        I'm sure SpaceX would be more than willing to sign a non-exclusive no-minimums fixed-price-per-launch (based on mass/orbit/etc) indefinite contract for any types of missions the SLS could hope to do. This type of contract isn't even new to NASA (or SpaceX), it's just the policy says "competition" like SLS has to exist and be funded too. The two main stated aims of fostering competition are contingencies for any single provider and hopes that funding competition lowers cost in the long term (which is separate from preventing cost from going up). I used to be much more supportive of this policy... but nowadays I find myself on the fence. It's hard for me to believe however many billions of dollars we funnel into SLS per launch will ever result in cheap alternatives being developed. It may even have the opposite effect of "SLS got funded through all of its overruns on this policy, we should have no problems doing it again". On the contingency side it's a bit harder to navigate... but it's starting to feel like programs like SLS don't produce realistic alternatives anyways so how much of a contingency is it really providing to fund things like that.

georgeburdell 1y ago

Your point was stronger 6 months ago before SpaceX started regressing on their Starship test flights. The U.S. needs to have multiple horses in the race

somenameforme 1y ago
I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. And I'm contrasting this against SLS cost "projections", which invariably end up lowballing reality. I'm steel-manning the argument for the SLS as much as I can, but it's still just nonsensical. The idea we need to compete against ourselves is something that came straight from Boeing after they lost their bid for commercial crew, leading to them to use their connections to Congress to force NASA to make an unprecedented decision to give bids to 2 different companies. SpaceX succeeded at commercial crew putting astronauts on the ISS in 2020. Boeing, by contrast, was allowed to skip parts of the testing phase (for Commercial Crew), failed others, and was still greenlit because of corruption. And that's precisely how you ended up with the two astronauts put on their first human launch stranded on the ISS for months, only to end up getting rescued by SpaceX. It's a nonsensical argument - we didn't create two Apollo programs, because there's no justification. And in any case, Boeing is clearly incapable of producing anything resembling a "horse" for this race. Instead we get a 3-legged mule sold at 5-time Kentucky Derby winner thoroughbred prices.
- ginko 1y ago
  >I did not mention Starship, because I'm not comparing the SLS against future tech, but against tech that was finished 7 years ago and is commercially available at this very moment. You mentioned Falcon Heavy but that has less than half the payload of SLS.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - adastra22 1y ago
    It is enough payload.

mjamesaustin 1y ago

The real tragedy is that the administration withdrew Jared Isaacman's nomination to be NASA administrator. He had bold plans for modernizing NASA and the experience to lead. But he didn't kiss the ring and instead made comments suggesting NASA's budget shouldn't be eviscerated, so his appointment was torpedoed.

7e 1y ago
A tragedy avoided given his close ties to SpaceX and Musk, which would have been inappropriate at best and corruption at worst.
- wordofx 1y ago
  Just because Elon knows people doesn’t make it automatic corruption.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  The space industry is still pretty small, insiders naturally know one another and have professional contacts.
  - aredox 1y ago
    RFK jr. is destroying all US public health institutions for less "insiderism" than that.
- adastra22 1y ago
  He is a paying customer of SpaceX. Where’s the corruption?
somenameforme 1y ago
The administrator is definitely one of the weakest links in the system. Bridenstine was looking amazing for NASA then at one point he did a hard 180 and suddenly just became an unthinking Boeing cheerleader, and is largely responsible for the catastrophe that is Boeing's Starliner. And then as soon as he left office he suddenly is in a senior advisory role for some military industrial complex orgs, probably pulling 7 figures for a Zoom call now and then. But Isaacman? Well he's already a billionaire, and highly ideological towards progress in space. Yeah 0 chance he gets appointed.

gonzobonzo 1y ago

Manned space flight in generally is a hugely wasteful money sink. It eats up about 50% of NASA's budget, and there's no real reason for it other than "we're putting people into space because we want to put people into space." People vigorously defend these boondoggles, then finally admit they were a huge waste years after the fact (as we've seen with the space shuttle, and as we're now starting to see with the SLS).

esseph 1y ago
Idk, absolutely does fucking not at all look wasteful: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-20-years-of-science-aboard-the-international-space-station/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-...
- gonzobonzo 1y ago
  > Idk, absolutely does fucking not at all look wasteful It does if you actually look into at the facts instead of just taking a PR listicle at face value. For instance, the very first thing mentioned on that list is Alzheimer's. Go ahead and look into what the ISS actually did with regards to Alzheimer's, and you see a lot of "this has the potential to teach us more about the disease," without any evidence that anything was ever learned. There's a reason why you don't hear researcher's working on these diseases go "well, we expect a huge breakthrough once this ISS experiment is done!" This is the problem every time this gets discussed. People just run a Gish Gallop of copying and pasting a big list of vague claims from the NASA PR department, without bothering to look at the actual claims to see if they're accurate. When you do, they're invariably far less than they're made out to be.
  - esseph 1y ago
    So many of the things we use today on a daily basis came from having a manned space program. It used to be that in the 1960s we were spending about 4.4% of the total federal budget on the space program. Since the 1970s, it's gone down to around 0.71%. Since the 2010s, it's gone down even further to 0.3% - 0.4%. We've also not pushed much for talent in the federal government by way of salary and perks. Despite these challenges, there are a whole host of technologies, medical treatments, navigational advancements, etc. we would not have without simply being in space. Even accounting for inflation adjusted dollars, the amount total spent in the history of NASA, across all programs, is absolutely miniscule to the technological and economic advancements that have come from it. There are around 1,600 published papers with data from the ISS, and those have been collectively cited over 14,000 times by other papers. That is a significant impact and can only be done by having people there.

throwawaysleep 1y ago

SLS is what keeps Elon from having American spaceflight in his own personal vice.

rsynnott 1y ago

> It was mostly obsoleted by Falcon Heavy years ago (SLS has been a black hole of funding since 2011), and its costs are completely ridiculous Falcon Heavy: Claimed payload to LEO (though it has never done anything like this): 63 tonnes. SLS: 95t, 105t or 130t depending on version. These are quite different capabilities.

pfdietz 1y ago
The need for such large payloads is highly disputable, especially for propellant (which is most of the mass of any space mission). This is why the congressional porkmeisters have been so adamant about NASA not developing in-space propellant storage and transfer.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > The need for such large payloads is highly disputable Getting mass to orbit is one thing. The real game is "get masses into orbit and back to Earth", with the "mass" in question being either some sort of explosive, troops, ammunition or tanks. When you don't need to have troops and vehicles distributed across the globe (which is very expensive to maintain) but can just go and ship them off with heavy rockets, the math on warfare shifts drastically.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Let me express great skepticism here as to the economics of this. Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS.
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      > Shipping things by air is expensive enough; shipping them by rocket will be even more expensive. As if the US military would take care about costs. They transported fuel into Afghanistan and provided it to its military at insane costs, but a large amount of it got stolen because no one cared about auditing [1]. > And shipping troops by SLS? Utterly demented. So this cannot be an argument for SLS. Not for SLS... but for SpaceX with Starship. The USSF plans a demo flight for 2026 [2]. And militarily, this capacity is definitely worth it. 100 tons of cargo, delivered to any place in the world that has a suitable landing facility in one hour of flight time. There's absolutely nothing that can come close to this kind of logistic capability, and there is no competitor in sight. It would be an absolute edge over Russia, China or anyone else who thinks they can wage war against the US or whomever the US thinks is worthy enough of its protection. [1] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-military-handling-fuel-afghan-forces/ https://www.airandspaceforces.com/watchdog-report-blasts-us-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Cargo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Cargo

sandworm101 1y ago

>> Senate Launch System A name also thrown around for shuttle. Do a little digging and a surprising number of shuttle crews had ties to the US congress, either as relatives or who themselves would later become representatives. They even flew a handful of serving reps (ie John Glenn, aged 77). Nasa has always known how to foster relations with political power families.

IAmBroom 1y ago
> or who themselves would later become representatives. That's irrelevant. "Former astronaut" is buttercreme icing on any political resume.
- sandworm101 1y ago
  Or they were from well-connected political families. The path for wealthy sons of academy ... elite military job ... politics, is well worn. Someone like John Maccain could easily be identified as a future political leader. He would have been a prime nasa candidate if not injured.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Go look at the resumes of astronauts, particularly before modern DEI stuff. For instance here [1] is Buzz Aldrin. A-student in school, varsity football center for a state championship team. Graduated third in his class at West Point with a degree of mechanical engineering while also competing in track and field. Enlisted in the Air Force as a combat fighter pilot where he saw plentiful [successful] combat including dog fighting. Enrolled at MIT and earned a doctorate in astronautics. His thesis was "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous, the dedication of which read: "In the hopes that this work may in some way contribute to their exploration of space, this is dedicated to the crew members of this country's present and future manned space programs. If only I could join them in their exciting endeavors!" He then began work as an engineer on Project Gemini. He then applied to become an astronaut and was rejected because he had not passed test pilot qualifications. He sought a waiver, and was rejected. Fortuitously for him, the next round of astronauts NASA sought required being a test pilot or having at least 1000 hours of flying time in a jet. He had more than 2,200 hours in jets alone. And at that point, he applied again, and was accepted. --- McCain [2] - prep school (where he at least wrestled), graduated from the US Naval Academy ranked 894 of 899 students. Completed flight school where he was regarded as careless and reckless, having crashed his craft multiple times. He then requested a combat assignment. The first carrier he was on caught fire killing hundreds shortly after he arrived. He moved to another carrier and was shot down and captured a couple of months later. Not exactly "The Right Stuff." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz_Aldrin#Early_life_and_edu... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Early_life_and_edu...

ApolloFortyNine 1y ago

Just to add to this, somehow the current plan for getting to the moon involves over 15 launches (or 25, the number does seem to vary). With Starship actually having a larger payload than the Saturn V at least to LEO, how 15 launches could possibly be required, and such a plan been approved to spend billions of dollars on, I just don't know. So as much as I like the idea of NASA, something needs to be done there.

datadrivenangel 1y ago
They got it down to 15 launches? Excellent news. The starship refueling in LEO requiring multiple fuel starships is not advantages from a mass perspective...
filoeleven 1y ago
Destin from Smarter Every Day put up a video of a talk he gave at NASA about this program, focusing on all the problems that nobody's talking about. It's a great watch and a good example of how to say the hard things to the people who need to hear them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU
- ApolloFortyNine 1y ago
  That's the one I watched and then fact checked after because I couldn't believe it. Quite frankly, 15 launches should have never been submitted let alone approved. That it was approved and billions burned already is an obvious sign that something is wrong at NASA.

Arubis 1y ago

Senate Launch System sounds more appealing every day. All aboard!