NASA, Boeing ink $2.8 billion deal to develop SLS rocket for deep space mission

His state is hardly the only one that will benefit, but it is indeed often called the Senate Launch System. But after Apollo NASA has been more a public works program than anything else, and for that matter one of the explicit goals of Apollo was to spend a lot of money in the South and "uplift" it.

You can tell this is propaganda when you see garbage like this:

"'The launch abort system (LAS) is a key reason that Orion is intended to become the safest spacecraft ever built. In an emergency it could activate to pull the crew module and the astronauts it will carry away from the launch pad and the rocket in milliseconds' NASA officials wrote on their Web site."

The crew modules that preceded the Space Shuttle, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, all had one as well even when flying on inherently safer liquid fueled boosters; they're safer because you can turn them off. Look at the second paragraph of the link below about how the Air Force figured the Ares I SRB stack made crew survival impossible for an abort 30-60 seconds after launch; hopefully this system can vector the SRBs to the side in an abort, and their presence alone probably makes this system overall less safe than the pre-Shuttle ones.

About the only thing I can say in favor of the SLS is that they dropped the Constellation Program Ares I idea of using a primary booster with a 5 segment SRB---and note those, and perhaps the SLS SRBs, were brand new wider versions, throwing away almost all the theoretical cost savings of reusing the Space Shuttle SRBs (look for when they talk about reusing Space Shuttle technology instead of hardware). That extra length version produced vibrations that could by themselves kill the crew (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I#Analysis_and_testing), and the Orion capsule's utility was steadily decreased as they added vibration damping hardware instead of fixing the problem. I sure hope the 5 segment option in the SLS doesn't have this problem.

But I don't understand what NASA gains by buying bespoke hardware instead of simply buying a Dragon launch. It seems weird - a very expensive case of "Not Invented Here".

This is particularly true given Elon Musk's publicly announced ambitions for beyond-LEO missions using the Falcon stack, and his demonstrated ability to execute on his ambitions.

> Anything measured in milliseconds rather than seconds at that point might save lives.

Yes, but if you're talking about system reaction - the start of motion - rather than result - the safety distance - then it's nothing surprising here. These systems always worked in under 1 second time frame - don't know exact timing, but it's all electronics. At this point it becomes rather misleading about what is being said - this system claims a particularly fast reaction between first sensor detection and detecting raising temperature of the charge of solid rocket pulling the capsule away? Or something else? It's mentioned without specifying necessary details, so it can be understood differently - that's why it looks strange.

> The space shuttle didn't have anything similar, nor does soyuz or anything else.

Pad abort system is used on all Soyuz spacecrafts, which fly since 1960-s. Was even used in Soyuz-18 flight abort. Pad abort system was used for TKS flights - unmanned, but the spacecraft was built to carry people. Pad abort system is used for Shenzhen spacecraft flights. Those systems weren't used in Space Shuttle - but were used elsewhere. That means the claim "safest spacecraft ever built", considering that some relevant comparable spacecrafts are from outside the US, is lacking specification "in US". Which makes the statement look strange.

Agree, they didn't go beyond LEO. However, at about the same time, Soviets launched several Zonds - which were stripped-down versions of Soyuz spacecrafts - to Moon fly-bys, in automatic mode. In 1988 USSR launched Buran - arguably a close technical sibling of the Space Shuttle - admittedly on LEO (would be really amusing to see a bird like that higher than on LEO), also unmanned. I wonder if that still allows to say "this is something that was not possible during Apollo/Shuttle programs".

Regarding remote-controlled part. Do you think author stresses the differences and really mean that full automation vs. remote control? It's usually convenient to rely on some support from Earth for complex missions - doesn't make sense to make spacecraft fully autonomous - and I haven't heard Orion designers explicitly mentioning that self-sufficient approach.