NASA goes back to the future with Artemis

We should’ve been on Mars by now.

If NASA needed to get its funding back, it had to win back the support of both Congress and the public; the Space Shuttle program was one big PR initiative. But the design flaws due to its necessary versatility caused massive delays between missions and costs of $450 million per launch (1.6 billion including maintenance, buildings, wages, etc). In addition, the program was marred by a pattern of neglect of safety in favor of quick turnovers to dazzle Congress and the public, leading to the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

At the beginnings of the Space Shuttle program in the early 1970s, the technology was still new and relatively cutting-edge. But as the money flow described above settled nicely throughout the next few decades, there was no need to change anything about the program’s aims; actual space exploration was really an afterthought, as long as it kept the jobs. Therefore, while the world — and its technology — evolved, NASA’s program stayed largely the same.

Though the above prediction was made in 2011, its accuracy is almost spooky. For one, officials sure took their time in deciding what to actually do with the thing; the Artemis program and its lunar goal was only established in 2017. Not that it mattered; the very first test launch rocket (now named Artemis I) blew by its initial 2016 launch date, finally lifting off on November 16th, 2022 after over 16 delays. It has now taken twelve years between SLS’s beginnings and its test launch; there were eight years between President Kennedy announcing the Apollo program and boots on the moon.

Therefore, it is clear that the fully expendable SLS is merely a mechanism that provides the cheapest way of funneling the money into jobs and contracted companies. The money doesn’t actually go into the rocket; if it did, it would be a completely different beast. Instead, it travels through the rocket into the pockets of the corporations.

Like planting a tree, the best time to send a rocket to Mars was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.

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