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Comment by rdxm | Hacker News Reader

After something like 6+ months of introspection from the first test fire fail...after a decade plus of missed schedules...blah, blah, blah.

The SLS is a shit-show, everyone knows it and it's getting tedious being a tax payer given this bull shit, the F35 debacle, etc.

I'm a NASA fan, but the reality is that the age of G funded space travel is OVER. time to move on....

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The first green run was on January 16th, so only about 2 months between the issue popping up and the fix being implemented and verified.

Also, the first test did not reveal any kind of flaw in design or construction of the stage. It aborted early because of hydraulic pressure fluctuations that were within spec -- but exceeded extremely conservative limits in place for that test to protect the stage. The main thing that differed in the second test was a software tweak to relax those limits.

I personally think continuing the program is throwing good money after bad, given the availability of alternatives and the limited missions left for SLS (I'm not sure they're planning to use it for anything other than Orion at this point) -- but test failures are expected in rocketry (SpaceX has plenty in public), and it makes no sense at all to beat NASA up for this one.

Government funded is not over, but government building rockets and working with specific contractors on Cost-Plus contracting is over.

The difference is that as bad as the F-35 is, cancelling it would have huge repercussions. On the other hand, the SLS could be cancelled tomorrow and nobody outside of NASA and the contractors would even notice.

Comparatively the F-35 is a lot better anyway. Its nowhere near as bad as people like to scream about it, it was just built for a world that doesn't really exist anymore and didn't meet the ambitious targets set for it originally. New F-16s are just as expensive (flyaway, presumably cheaper to maintain, but an F-16 is going to be a sitting duck against a stealth fighter with a modern sensor package as time goes on)

Falcon 9 was government-funded.

If Starship sends people or cargo to the lunar surface, it will be NASA-funded through the HLS program.

What is dead is the old cost-plus contracting model.

> G funded space travel is OVER

Who do you think is going to be paying for the launches?

January was only 2 months ago

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