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I’m trying to think how I feel about this. I’ve been obsessed with space for a long time, remember traveling to see my first rocket launch of the shuttle in 2006. Follow the commercial development closely since then. Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be.

NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better. You can debate some of the specifics, sure, but if all this current state of uncertainty brings is a clean slate and new ways of thinking in 4 years, that’s better IMHO than looking back 4 years from now watching NASA brute force a token moon landing on the back of ancient technology. Which they may still do!

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> NASA needs an overhaul. This isn’t how I would do it, but that’s not how things work in the real world. SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster. It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better.

It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul. Over the years NASA administrators have pushed back on SLS to the fullest extent you’d expect, but it’s not their call how Congress allocates money.

Losing career managers, scientists and engineers isn’t going to fix any of the things you want to see fixed.

It’s going to kill institutional knowledge and be so expensive to repair after regime change.

I think the institutional knowledge from the golden age is already gone.

Hopefully some of the NASA folks make their way to https://www.oah.org/2025/03/04/federal-employees-oral-histor...

In the case of NASA, they could stand to shed a lot of the institutional structure they’ve built up. When institutional knowledge becomes more about navigating bureaucracy than doing engineering, something needs to break.

My dream outcome would be that they shrink down the bureaucracy massively, retire a lot of the career middle managers who make sure nothing ever moves too fast and no project is allowed to run lean, and then raise pay for the remaining people to attract some of the private sector talent that could infuse some new knowledge. The few people I know with SpaceX experience are not at all happy with the work environment there, but the pay and pace of a place like NASA aren’t an option for them.

> regime change.

And the normalisation of the language of totalitarianism continues.

I don’t disagree, but it’s grim.

Ever org I've worked for slowly became unable to innovate because of "institutional knowledge".

I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X.

There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective: you need to restart every some years, to not stagnate.

From what I've seen, if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.

And did you stick around to see what happens after they go full tabula rasa? I have: they fall so far behind they close up shop. The proper response is to move slowly and intentionally and use indicators. Like ‘design thinking’, with prototyping and feedback and incremental feedback, not burn shit to the ground because planning is too hard mentality. But I realize that’s what shareholders demand. And now that gov’t is being run like a business, prepare to see bankruptcies.

Fortunately other, more rational countries, will fill the gaps. They’ve just been complacent because the US was on its game for so long. Especially the ESA.

== What you end up with will always be better than what you started with.==

That is quite the absolute statement. Could you share some data to back this up?

Sorry it wasn't clear enough, but I was paraphrasing Jim Keller. See the several Lex Fridman episodes with him, where he talks about it. The success with his projects would probably be the data you're looking for.

Entrenched ways are not the same as institutional knowledge. You can have one without the other. Some things are not written down but executed as part of common knowledge, and if you drop enough people you'll have to relearn it the hard way.

> Entrenched ways are not the same as institutional knowledge.

I disagree, fundamentally. Institutional knowledge is a set of "truths" that are respected, so necessarily prune the solution space. The only way to get those pruned branches back is to disregard it, by reconsidering, and re-traversing that solution space.

Heving been there 95% of the time you just learn the hard way whp theeold timers did it that way in the first place - and most of the rest you just make a different compromise that has different tradeoffs but isn't better.

In my eyes, institutional knowledge is figuring out what things do NOT work, not what did back then. When you lose that, you're wasting years or even decades hitting the exact same pitfalls the old guard hit once upon a time. Many truly bright minds aren't those asserting how this was the best method and then burying their heads in the sand when other ideas come out.

My time working with some of the brightest minds in my industry taught me that they aren't necessaily some visionary, nor super genius, nor even some workaholic putting 20+ hours a day into their craft (though I have met a few I would describe as such). The gap between me and them wasn't over some raw intellect. It was many times a matter of me thinking of an idea and them talking about how that was tried 5-20 years ago and why that lead down a huge rabbit hole.

> is figuring out what things do NOT work, not what did back then

Yes, this is my point. It's pruning the solution space before traversing it. The diligent approach is to temporarily disregard that knowledge, and do a quick re-exploration to test if it's still true.

> to some extent

This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.

In my eyes, they already traversed it and can explain why it's very similar to an old idea. They don't must see an old idea woth lipstick on it and instantly jump on it for the sake of trying something new.

As of now, this same mentality is used to push AI into everywhere. Not only is the intent bad, but the tech doesn't even work. That's not "resisting change". That's experimenting and realizing the hype was just that.

>This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.

The comment itself definitely reveals more than a light suggestion.

> In my eyes, they already traversed it and can explain why it's very similar to an old idea.

This was precisely my point in [1]. It's fundamentally the same: a pruning of the solution space without re-traversal.

> why it's very similar to an old idea.

And, with diligence, you verify that the new context is exactly the same as the old. You do this by knowing that it might not be, in other words, you temporarily suspending your trust in that knowledge, and re-traverse it with the current context.

>It's fundamentally the same

It's a thin line of wisdom and conservatism, but an important distinction. People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod. But that's exactly what tends to be proposed: big multi month initiatives, not some prototype to test over a sprint.

The important question I learned to ask was "what problem am I trying to solve". One aspect of this thin line tends to be a muddy answer to this question. When you can only suspect and make grand showings instead of showing pragmatic use case you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.

> People in these positions work on billion dollar software, so they can't just try out every idea that comes to mind in prod.

Exactly, the ability to innovate ceases. Risk is most easily avoided by leaning on the existing institutional knowledge to direct new decisions even though they may be in new contexts.

> you may not in fact be iterating, but experimenting.

By definition, iteration is not innovation. Innovation is new ideas. New ideas aren't possible without experimentation, otherwise they would be known ideas.

Most large companies move from innovation to acquisition for a reason: the risk of innovation is too great for a large company to stomach.

I think you are using a non-standard definition of institutional knowledge that begs the question in the rest of your posts.

The standard phrase "institutional knowledge" merely refers to knowledge and skills that are carried by members of the organization. This is often much more than what is formally codified into the processes and training materials. As such, it can lead to loss of capability when there is too much turnover.

You seem to be conflating it with some other kind of bureaucratic conservatism or group-think. While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.

> The standard phrase "institutional knowledge" merely refers to knowledge and skills that are carried by members of the organization.

Yes, that't is my definition. But, that knowledge has very real practical effects and influence on the org, from the weight (those with it usually are in position of seniority/power) and momentum that knowledge carries, especially when approaching new problems, or reconsidering old problems. The mechanism for that can be anywhere from "this is industry standard" to "the director says we should focus on this approach", with the ever present "lets not risk it".

> While that is a common dysfunction of long-running organizations, I think it is an orthogonal characteristic.

I agree that it's logically orthogonal, but not practically. I think the actual killer of orgs is the sum of all the small scale risk avoidance. I think risk is most easily avoided by adhering to the institutional knowledge (what was done and what is known). Innovation eventually becomes a completely foreign concept.

> Ever org I've worked for slowly became unable to innovate

There's more to life than "innovation", but what you say tracks, I was part of an organization that became extremely innovative but went bust in the process.

> we have Space X.

Which is amazing for earth-orbit commercial launches, but doesn't move the needle for the many other things NASA concerns itself with, like research as mentioned elsewhere.

This seems similar to the "let's just rebuild from scratch" impulse that has been tried so many times on very large complicated systems and often, although not always, fails.

== if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.==

Jim Keller’s own biography kind of dispels this notion. He worked at DEC for 16 years when he was a young engineer (24-40 years old).

I'm not sure dot-com era DEC had much stagnation or institutional knowledge that wasn't continuously overrun, nor would it be comparable to most big orgs these days.

He worked there starting in 1982. When do you think the dot-com era started?

He started in a greenfield industry, the immediate pre-requisite for dot com era, then through the dot com era. There was no institutional knowledge when he started, and a good portion of it would be irrelevant when he quit. It was all new.

When he started at DEC in 1982, they had 67,000 employees and almost $4 billion in revenue. It seems like that type of success and size would imply some institutional knowledge. Their revenue, income, and employee count started stagnating in 1989. He worked there until 1998.

No need to keep going back and forth on this as you seem to have dug in your heels.

https://sutherla.tripod.com/infsoc/computers/dec_pl.html

It's not back a fourth as much as you think I've stated some hard black and white rule, without exceptions. I think it's generally true. In this case, is the exception DEC or Jim Keller? Would he agree? I don't know. Some large orgs run like a collection of startups, internally.

But, I don't think DEC, a company working through the beginning of computer through peak dot com era, where every aspect was doubling or completely changing every year, is a context where holding onto ideas formed in an old context was viable or possible. You would, necessarily, have to temporarily suspend your trust in the institutional knowledge, with every new problem, since the whole compute world that the institutional knowledge was built on would have shifted under you.

But what are we even doing here? We have an entire political party that is anti science. This isn't some temporary setback, it's an ideology.

Is the future going to be completely defunding science for 4 (or 8) years and then whipsawing back to normal levels once the republicans lose power?

It seems like as long as the parties are close to popularity of each other and one party is explicitly anti science there is no way to build anything sustainable. This is no way to run a country.

That’s a great point. I think it’s just trying to boil the ocean.

> It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul. Over the years NASA administrators have pushed back on SLS to the fullest extent you’d expect, but it’s not their call how Congress allocates money.

They don't call it the Senate Launch System for nothing

I think it's more accurate to say that our oligarchs need an overhaul. Some of the worst people who are actively working against the public are consistently ending up in positions of incredible, unchecked power.

  > It’s more accurate to say that Congress needs an overhaul.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a big reason NASA is so expensive. There's a lot of contracts and so NASA actually has contractors in every single state. They even brag about it[0], which should be a good hint to you that it is political. This makes is a bit of a wealth distribution system. That's either good or bad depending on your perspective and what you think the main goals are...

But there's a few programs that have these types of problems, not just NASA. IMO, there's probably more efficient ways to meet each goal, by decoupling the problem. But either way, we can't solve "the problem" unless we actually recognize what it is (and there's a lot more than what I've just mentioned)

[0] https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/nasainthe50states/

> It’s a jobs program limping along decades old technology when the commercial options are better.

I’ve worked with a few former NASA employees now.

They all said the same thing: There were some amazing, passionate people at NASA but they were all surrounded by people who were only there to attend meetings and collect paychecks. Getting anything done was impossible because you had to navigate webs of org structure and process that had been designed to make work and jobs for people, not to deliver results.

My one ex-NASA coworker got a lot of mileage out of telling people he worked for NASA, putting it on his LinkedIn, and mentioning it when he introduced himself to new people. People respect the name. It was a stark contrast to how he described his actual time there.

I share your experience.

The national labs are also a lot like this.

> There were some amazing, passionate people at NASA but they were all surrounded by people who were only there to attend meetings and collect paychecks

Which do you think takes a severance package?

I worked as a civil servant for a decade and a half in various capacities up until a couple of weeks ago. I'm the last person that would tell you that there isn't plenty of fat that could be trimmed. Slicing at random, multiple delayed resignation opportunities, and threatening cuts to benefits, however, is doing the opposite. Those that are skilled enough and in demand, or like me lucky enough, to quickly find other employ, are the ones that are going to leave- leaving behind nothing but the fat.

People who should be fired are the very people who would be the best at justifying why they shouldn't be fired. Not at all by a coincidence.

"Slicing at random" could actually outperform most other methods, as long as it's truly random. You can weasel your way out of a firing based on vibes or performance reviews - but you can't convince an RNG that its roll was wrong.

Slicing at random would leave the same ratio of worker types. Random slices have the potential to cause enormous damage by removing critical contributors while also creating exploitable power vacuums. The actual solution is to just continue operating the way NASA has been operating because it's not actually a problem.

Not actually a problem? Have you seen what NASA is doing lately?

SLS. Orion. Gateway. Ambitionless Artemis. JPL's disaster of an MSR proposal. NASA reeks of rot and decay. It's not in a good place, and hasn't been in a long time now.

If you "just continue operating", it's only going to get worse.

SLS is Congress, not NASA. The core mission of NASA is space exploration and their achievements in that domain are unparalleled.

Randomly firing and cutting funding isn’t a solution. Especially not to a perceived problem. If you think the spending is excessive you have to do the hard work of explaining why and then the even harder work of fixing it. If that seems too hard then yeah, it’s fine.

> Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be

Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget? I don't mean to be snarky, but level of inspiration is pretty subjective and difficult to put a price tag on. Honestly, I feel like the NASA budget needs to be considered in context relative to the DoD budget and then these cuts look much less convincing as being necessary.

"Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget?"

It would be closer to 2%, but we could measure it by engagement. Ask people what their last positive interaction was with NASA vs the military. The military does all sorts of outreach with things like the Blue Angels, stadium flyovers, competitions at fairs, etc. Ask them what NASA has done over the past year vs what the military has done over the past year. Chances are many people couldn't name something NASA achieved in the past year. Would it be at the 2% number? I don't know.

I'm not saying one is better than the other. I think both should look for budget inefficiency, but until those are identified I wouldn't propose budget cuts. But it does seem that the NASA missions could be more inspiring recently.

Hello,

US Military FY 2024 enacted budget: ≈ $842 billion

NASA FY 2024 enacted budget: ≈ $24.9 billion

That is a ~35x multiplier. By bog-standard logical implication your question answers itself.

How many people on HN have a James Webb wallpaper?

How many people have a fighter jet?

I don't think James Webb was launched in the past year. Even so, HN is a tiny percentage of the country and focused on STEM. I would expect the number of people with a James Webb wallpaper nationally to be under 2%.

Clearly NASA should do more stadium flyovers.

The point is that most of what NASA does is not something that people are exposed to. Nobody cares about the dozens of small breakthroughs that happen in the years leading up to a mission. Just as nobody cares about engine tech advancements in the planes flying over.

I’m sorry but this is asinine. All of the “positive interactions” you listed are literally propaganda events to increase the palatability of the US military and encourage enrolment.

Yes, and propaganda to put the public on it's side would benefit NASA in it's budget battles.

> Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget?

I dare say a great many people are very inspired by what the DoD does with their budget. Inspired to what... well, that's another subject. And the most inspired people are not the ones living in the US.

> Are they 1% as inspiring as what the DoD does with their budget?

People aren't inspired by safe shipping lanes. But quite a few are alive because of what global shipping enables.

I agree that inspiration is probably not a great metric for many tax payer funded organizations including DoD and NASA

>People aren't inspired by safe shipping lanes.

Captain Phillips was a pretty good movie.

I hesitated posting this because my very moderate east coast American perspective seems to be appreciated less and less here. I posted this on a lazy Sunday morning and it got a lot of positive initial comments and discussion. Then a few hours later it turned negative.

Science is great but launch vehicle innovation is where the problem is so that’s why I focused on SLS. We could easily have 100 JWSTs today if something like starship were operational. NASA dragging its feet for decades, building silly things likes SLS, trying to find token uses to justify it, doesn’t inspire me anymore.

Can you expand on what you mean by token uses? Wasn't Saturn V used for golf on the moon?

Putting the first people on the moon, the first people on any foreign celestial body, as a show of power during the cold war isn't what I'd consider "token".

Putting people on the moon today is a lot less substantive, and doing it with decades old technology makes it even less so.

I see the correlation you're trying to draw: "neither is of any practical use", but I think even that ignores the very deliberate effects the first space race had on the USSR.

I’m speaking of SLS. It’s a solution in search of a problem.

SLS is a solution for the problem of the US needing a large launch vehicle. That's not the issue. The issue is that it's taken way more time and money than anticipated and hasn't shown good results.

Budget and schedule overruns are expected with any large project - it's just the nature of contracting. But there are limits, and SLS blew past them quite a while ago. I'm not sure how much of it is NASA's fault given how much congressional meddling has gone on, though.

That’s fair, it’s gone on so long that the problem it was solving for has evolved. Someone has to be strong enough to know when to cut the sunk cost and shift gears and that’s how I’m choosing to look at the current situation.

It's worse than that - SLS siply can't do what it was supposed to on paper even after 10's of billions, resulting in the secondary boondoggle of the Lunar Gateway which will waste billions more and still fail to achieve lunar-relevant

NASA didn't want SLS and was very vocal about that. Congress earmarks funding for pet projects which is the only reason we have SLS. I'm not sure how you can say NASA is "dragging their feet" while also claiming to care about space. NASA's list of accomplishments is long and there isn't a gap.

>Then a few hours later it turned negative.

Happens all the time.

Europe vs us east vs us west.

I’m afraid I don’t understand how Starship could help proliferate JWST. It was launched with Ariana 5 which is a mature launch system.

The bottleneck is actual manufacturing of JWST - the folding mirror was especially fraught; I think the sunshield as well.

So many ways. The current paradigm is that it gets one chance and it has to be perfect. Starship (which I'm only referencing as the bleeding-edge launch vehicle) compared to Ariane 5 could be a fraction of half the cost, with double the volume and 4x the mass. With those constraints removed the science missions had a lot more flexibility in their design.

JWST cost $10B. The launch was expensive at $1.5B; but getting that down to $750M won’t really change the availability.

I'm a firm believer that if the mass and volume constraints were relaxed the design of such an instrument could be greatly simplified.

Hmm, I didn’t consider that, very good point. With 10x the volume, maybe the mirror and sunshine origami could have been avoided or much simpler. I wonder how to figure out how much the cost was because of that complicated mechanics…

The Europa Clipper mission saved $3B+ just by switching from SLS to Falcon Heavy.

> Their science missions are inspiring, but not as inspiring as they ought to be.

NASA's science missions have been incredible.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a 6.5-meter-diameter infrared telescope at Lagrange Point 2 that can measure the atmospheric chemistry of planets orbiting other stars and measure the spectra of galaxies that were around 10 billion years ago.

The Curiosity rover landed on Mars by being lowered to the ground from a rocket-powered "sky-crane." It was powered by a radioactive battery, has been driving around and taking measurements for more than a decade, and has shown that Mars was likely habitable billions of years ago.

What kind of inspiration do you feel is lacking there?

SLS is elephant in the room - but Mars Sample Return is arguably even worse

Money for SLS is separate part of the budget, its mismanagement causes reputational damage - MSR budget is part of NASA probe budget, mismanagement there causes stall, worse performances and cancellations for AWFUL amount of other projects

MSR has indeed been a mess. I think it's pretty obvious that NASA has been trying to instill a "sunk costs" mentality in Congress, and it's not working out the way they wanted.

MSR is a fine enough concept though, I think Rocket Lab's proposal to get it done is sound and the government should take them up on the offer. If nothing else, the money to Rocket Lab for MSR development would help to make Rocket Lab a more viable SpaceX competitor, which should pay off for the US government in the long run.

MSR as NASA's JPL envisioned it was a disaster. But there was a chance that someone like Rocket Lab could actually make it work without breaking the bank.

Anytime you have subcontractors of the subcontractor of the prime contract holder, you’re going to get construction projects that go 20 years. It’s totally a jobs program. Job security and predictable pay outs.

The entire space coast of Florida was built on this, from Kennedy Space Center down to Jupiter, FL.

Beyond FL, they’re careful to make sure parts of the rocket at built in EVERY state! Now something that should be cutting edge innovation is tied to Congress which is intentionally not innovative and you wonder why it falls behind.

There's that but also NASA gets continually screwed with, the moon return mission changed scope every 8 or so years when a new president came in and wanted to put their own stamp on the project to claim it for themselves.

It's slightly less cynical than that - it takes about eight years to design a space mission and rocket, but doing the detailed design is expensive as hell, so in order to meet a budget, they then change the mission, so they can go back to the vastly more affordable task of talking about doing work, vs doing work

Even if it would work out to distribute the pork across the continent, the fact is that all this splitting introduces logistical cost (shipping) as well as development costs (red tape needed to approve any change). SpaceX doesn't have any of that crap, and Tesla (with its famous ditching of the old school "auto makers and parts suppliers" ecosystem) either.

One of the stipulations for SpaceX to even have contracts was they had to support the space coast. They do. Launches from Kennedy are frequent and the drone platform the rockets land on are stationed there. SpaceX is the new NASA and like you said, they don’t have the red tape of having to justify parts manufacturing across the states.

The sad reality is in the US, too many towns were built around a very specific and niche business. Coal in the Appalachian mountains, NASA and the space coast, Pittsburgh Steel… it’s a community plan that failed and yet is still being used today. Woe to those that move/live there.

NASA like most government agencies could use a good, independent audit. That's not what this is. The DOGE lie was all about going in with pre-determined goals to reduce and to embarrass every org that they "audited". It was to "prove" MAGA world's criticism even if they were completely wrong (and the vast majority are). MAGA world "leaders" think that the US's role as a lead in science and top universities needs to be damaged in order to reduce our role in the world. It can then attempt to repair it with private tech billionaire solutions that are under their 100% control, instead of having to deal with government between them and profits.

It depends on what you want out of the space program.

Americans seem to expect lots of flag waving and spaceships. Less fundamental science.

> but if all this current state of uncertainty brings is a clean slate and new ways of thinking in 4 years, that’s better IMHO

Isn't the greater likelihood that delivery of service will drop as a result of the cuts and they'll point to this to justify nullifying the entire programme?

The SLS was a good idea, and it's actually a great rocket. However you are correct in saying it turned into a huge program for the old school rocket industrial complex. I think the private sector currently does this better, or it's certainly debatable. However, I think it's a mistake to say only the private sector can do this kind of thing optimally. There is some multiverse in the timelines where government contractors create an industrial rocket production line that quickly and cheaply stamps out heavy lift rockets. Granted, it's easier said than done, but it still doesn't have to be so expensive. Clearly the expensive part should be the R&D with the industrial production parts being jigged, automated, and fully optimized. The SLS obviously went another route by making the rocket production bespoke with non optimal, manual labor, etc... that kind of protection is acceptable for one-off science mission payloads, but not heavy lift....

Anyhoo, NASA letting so many people resign is good if your opinion is such that lowering government expenditure is a good thing. So long as the exit package is comparable to retirement package these government employees would have got otherwise. My guess is the resignation package has great near term performance but low long term (retirement) performance, making it a great option for younger workers able to pivot to new careers.

If only you could offer congress deferred resignations...

isn't congress on fixed time contracts already....

No one would take it since the stock (trading on proprietary info) plan is so good.

Are NASA employees even a significant part of SLS? Doesn't the bulk of the money go to Boeing and Northrup Grumman?

> SLS is the elephant in the room and is a complete disaster

SLS isn't great but it does.. you know.. work.

Except for the under powered orbits but that is a whole other issue.

https://youtu.be/XFIvKSVRtZ0

https://youtu.be/sGT-8PHSVso

While it's hard to get the truth out of SpaceX but there's reliable evidence that the block one starship wasn't anywhere near its mass to orbit projections which is why they rushed the block two design which stopped their progress practically cold.

Does it? Do we want to repeat what we did 50 years ago or do we want to do something better and stay this time?

"Meet your mission objectives on the first try" is a pretty reasonable - if low-bar - definition of "works".

I read this recently, and it doesn't sound good

https://idlewords.com/2024/05/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

Any argument that is filled with this much ragebait should be dismissed out of hand.

I was hoping it was nonsense and someone would point out the errors, no such luck so far.

It's not complete nonsense, but it conveniently leaves out key relevant details and includes key pieces of misinformation needed to make the talking points make sense (as you would expect from rage bait.)

> Early on, SLS designers made the catastrophic decision to reuse Shuttle hardware

The law that mandated that NASA built the SLS also required that they re-use that hardware. This wasn't a choice made by NASA designers but by a bipartisan congress and it wasn't designed so much to advance our space program so much as a way to keep funneling money to space contractors with the end of the Shuttle program.

Any article that proposed to discuss the "lunacy" of Artemis without ever mentioning Congress's role in that lunacy is pretty clearly rage bait.

good to know, but the outlook for success is still the same? just the blame is not only NASA.

Artemis and SLS have many problems but I would look elsewhere than that article if you want an understanding of what they are and why they exist.

SLS doesn't serve any actual NASA needs. It's fake make-work. Case in point: Congress expressly ordered NASA to launch Europa Clipper on SLS, to make it appear that SLS was indispensable to core NASA science missions. But, due to design flaws, SLS turned out to be technically incapable of launching Clipper at all. So they backtracked and allowed free-market competition to compete for the Clipper launch. Which it did: a very, very cheap Falcon Heavy launched it instead.

Which it was capable of doing all along—Congress and NASA lied about this, misled the public, to make it appear that their jobs-creating, pork-barrel project was serving some genuine need NASA had. It wasn't! They had alternatives all along—they were pretending they didn't.

When you read about these things, you have to know all the actors you're getting information from, and what motives they have to mislead you.

There's not a single real mission in NASA's budget, or conceivable future budget, that needs an SLS—full stop. Sole exception being the moon project, which was created with the express purpose of finding a problem SLS would be the only answer for (and even that's now in doubt, what with Starship).

How many orbital refuels would Starship need for a lunar landing and return mission? Something like 20?

I honestly wonder why we didn't just stick with the Saturn V. 13 launches and only one (non-catastrophic) failure. If it aint broke don't fix it.

How many tons of payload would that Starship land? How many could Saturn V?

If you want to go beyond planting a flag, you need to be thinking of how to land hundreds of tons of equipment and industrial infrastructure on the Moon.

Saturn V isn't a very good fit for that. But SLS is much worse.

What was the one failure of the Saturn V that you mention? If you're thinking of Apollo 13, that took place after the Apollo stack had ditched all of the Saturn V stages.

Apollo 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_6

Had that happened on a crewed mission, they could have returned astronauts safely. Which is probably why they went ahead with Apollo 8

Thanks for that link!

It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.)

Consequently, it can't do a Moon mission like the Saturn V could, it requires the idiotic nonsense that is the NHRO, which will endanger astronauts because it can't get Orion (which is a whole other can of pork) into a low lunar orbit. It also can't handle the lander, so now Artemis has to count on SpaceX and/or Blue Origin for that, which is probably what you're alluding to not working. But if those don't work, then neither does Artemis and then how can you say SLS works?

Another problem with SLS is it's expensive AF and has a terrible launch cadence. Maybe you think that doesn't really matter, but it is for those reasons that NASA isn't going to test Orion again before putting astronauts on it. The last time they tested Orion, to verify the design and modelling, the heat shield started to come apart. But NASA can't do another test flight, because SLS sucks so hard, so instead they're going to fly Orion on an untested trajectory and trust their modeling to keep astronauts safe. Their same modeling which failed to predict Orion performance the first time. It's homicidally reckless. There is a real risk of this becoming yet another instance of NASA management's "go culture" getting people killed. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, each time they say they've learned their lesson and will make changes to ensure it doesn't happen again, but either those changes are only superficial or they decay over time. We're now on the precipice of NASA management flying astronauts around the Moon with a heat shield which may quite possibly disintegrate during reentry, because SLS is too expensive for NASA to test it but NASA management wants to move forward anyway.

We need to have a viable heavy rocket launch capability in the US at any given time, at very least just in case we detect an asteroid on a collision course. Right now that seems to fall entirely onto Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy), but the max payload weight even for Falcon Heavy seems much lower than the planned payload for SLS. Someday Starship may fix this, but we don't know if it will -- or if the final version will actually meet the planned specs.

> We need to have a viable heavy rocket launch capability in the US at any given time

Well we don't have that. SLS isn't it and never will be. The most SLS can be is a heavy lift rocket that can be used once every few years with a lot of upfront notice. Certainly not "launch capable" at "any given time".

I don’t think “at any given time” means we have an asteroid intercept mission sitting around on standby, although that’d be nice. I think it means “the capability exists and can be rushed to readiness over a series of weeks or months, at virtually unlimited cost.” Not sure that’s possible any other way. I would be fine with canceling SLS once good heavy lift alternatives are available, though.

> It doesn't work, not for Moon missions. It was never designed for Moon missions in the first place, the original plan was unspecified "deep space" missions without any clear plan of what it would actually be doing (because it's actual purpose is to keep money flowing to old Shuttle contractors.)

Maybe I'm missing some details but I thought the entire purpose of first-stage rockets was to get a certain payload with certain max dimensions (what can fit inside a cylinder of a certain height and radius) to LEO, or the equivalent delta-V. At that point first stage is discarded anyway. So what exactly the payload is (beyond its dimensions) and you do with your payload after getting to LEO (or equiv delta V) that shouldn't really make a difference, and you can't blame the first stage (which SLS is) for that if it did its job.

In the case of SLS, Block I can get 95 metric tons, Block I-B can get 105 tons and Block II 130 tons.

The Falcon Heavy in comparison can only get max 64 tons to LEO, less if you want to recover boosters and the core to save money

The real winner is the Saturn V which could get 140 tons to LEO. I know it was expensive per launch (about $1 billion in 2025 dollars) but given all the billions we've blown on trying to develop cheaper tech it seemed like we could have just stuck with what we know worked

> "Maybe I'm missing some details but I thought the entire purpose of first-stage rockets was to get a certain payload with certain max dimensions (what can fit inside a cylinder of a certain height and radius) to LEO, or the equivalent delta-V. At that point first stage is discarded anyway. So what exactly the payload is (beyond its dimensions) and you do with your payload after getting to LEO (or equiv delta V) that shouldn't really make a difference,"

It makes a difference because if you're designing a rocket for a mission then you'll have a rocket that's as close to optimal for the mission, given mission requirements, timelines and budgets as you can reasonably get it. That's not SLS, the Moon mission wasn't planned when SLS was designed and instead SLS is optimized to reuse Shuttle hardware.

Being stuck with a rocket that wasn't designed for the mission, as well as the political decision to use Orion, severely compromise the planning of Artemis. SLS lacks the power to get Orion into a proper lunar orbit, so instead they're going to use a highly elliptical NHRO lunar orbit with an orbital period of 7 days. This is extremely dangerous, it means that if there is any sort of emergency on the moon the astronauts may have to wait as long as a week to get back to Orion; which is probably a death sentence. It also means the lander has to be huge to make up for SLS's inadequacy, which means the Artemis program now relies on the success of Starship HLS and/or Blue Origin's HLS. This is going to delay Artemis and the entire reason this dependency exists is because Congress wanted a shuttle-derived rocket foremost, and then made the situation even worse by saddling it with their Boeing pork capsule.

What it comes down to is SLS is a rocket that ""works"" but isn't actually good at anything and therefore never should have been built.

Why would 7 days be some death sentence? ISS missions have lasted a heckuva lot longer than that

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