If yesterday’s post, “SpaceX and T-Mobile Announce Direct Starlink to Mobile Phone Service”, provided a glimpse of the future, NASA’s 2022-08-26 “Artemis I Exploration Industry Partners Briefing” was a blast from the past.
Here, representatives of legacy aerospace contractors Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Jacobs NASA Enterprise Solutions, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Airbus touted their companies’ contributions to “sustainable” access to deep space with a rocket the NASA Inspector General has estimated will cost US$ 4.1 billion per launch, “a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable”, citing the “very poor” performance of the contractors on stage here. Several of the panelists emphasised that their contributions to the project were “built in all fifty states and multiple foreign countries”, spreading that yummy pork far and wide, and that they expected to keep their snouts in the trough continue to support human expansion into the solar system for the thirty year estimated duration of the Space Launch System (SLS) project. That’s thirty years into the future, not counting the 17 years the SLS has been under development (if you count its very similar ancestor, Ares V), without ever flying.