Over at Pajamas, Rand Simberg looks at the political and technical disaster that is the Senate Launch System (aka ‘the Rocket to Nowhere’).
I’m hardly naïve when it comes to the capacity for dishonesty and self-delusion among politicians, but the brazenness of these shenanigans is still breathtaking. Nobody wants this vehicle. Nobody needs this vehicle. The nation can’t afford this vehicle — neither in the sense of having the dollars to pay for it nor at the expense, as Rand notes, of all the useful space technology that could be funded with this money if we did have it.
The thing I can’t get over is that the same day NASA announced the SLS a bunch of NASA engineers gave a presentation for FISO on how we could go explore Mars on a slightly evolved (to 40t) Delta IV Heavy for about the samer cost as building the SLS.
http://spirit.as.utexas.edu/~fiso/telecon/Woodcock_9-14-11/
You’d think all the SLS fans would be saying
“Hey! Wait! Take this path and we can be on Mars by the time SLS actually flies!!”
The lack of consideration of this option shows to me their real interest.
They don’t want to explore. They just want to see the pretty rocket fly.