The news has been full of stories about the successful test of the Space Launch System’s core of four RS-25 engines at Mississippi’s Stennis Space Center on March 18. But the more I read, the more the tacit central theme of the project seems to be a multibillion-dollar effort of a middle-aged agency to relive its Apollo high school glory days.
Reinforcing this impression is the person nominated as the next NASA administrator. Bill Nelson, a former senator from Florida, was a key player in the in the political effort that directed NASA to undertake the SLS program in the first place. As a low draft number who took photos durng the evacuation that wrote Vietnam’s final chapter, I’m naturally skeptical, not to mention cynical, about any politician’s program because more often than not, they serve some unspoken ulterior motives, especially when such politicians found deferments from more direct participation.
If you doubt that, consider this. SLS will be the most powerful booster NASA has built since Apollo’s Saturn V. Engineers designed and built that heavy-lift rocket to meet the needs of the focused and well-defined goal that preceded it, President Kennedy’s challenge to send humans to the moon and return them safely to earth before the 1960s burned the last page of its calendar.
In 2010, senators wrote the legislation that directed NASA to design and build a rocket that would lift heavy things. They did not include in that legislation any specifics what those heavy things might be. I’m sure the engineers who designed the SLS would have liked to have had that information. Maybe that’s one reason why the program, like most government projects, blow well past their rosy projections of schedule and budget. 
It might have been worth it had the SLS debuted some new technology or capabilities. But it is nothing more than the spaceflight equivalent of a midlife crisis muscle car. Like the Saturn V, the SLS will loft heavy things into space and beyond Earth orbit, and like the Saturn, NASA gets one launch per booster, and each liftoff will run $2 billion, give or take.
Since NASA had to build the SLS, it had to find something heavy for it to lift. They started with an asteroid research mission. Eventually, the agency settled on Artemis’s return to the moon and then the fantasy flight to Mars. NASA schedules Artemis’s first flight carrying humans for 2023. We’ll see. Given our political and economic unpredictability, guaranteeing the future realization of any promise made today is pure fantasy.
If there is any hope for our aerospace future it is that the technical and scientific pragmatists displace the politicians striving to relive their high school glory days and hope to bask in the reflected glory of humans who undertake dangerous and expensive journeys into space that would be more effectively, efficiently, and economically made by machines. 
Perhaps the Artemis I mission is the culmination of the SLS midlife oxymoron. I’m all for investing in developing new technology that expands our exploration capabilities, but spending more than $2 billion on a test flight to make sure the Orion crew capsule is safe for humans to relive the flight of Apollo 8, which looped around the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968?
If you enjoyed this story, why not SUBSCRIBE to JetWhine, if you haven’t already, and please share it with anyone who might find it interesting. — Scott Spangler, Editor
Space Program
A Year in Space Rekindles Skyward Interests
To be honest, my interest in extraterrestrial explorations waned with the establishment of the International Space Station. Sometimes I felt guilty about this, usually when I watched the luminous dot race across the night sky (forewarned by an Astroextra issued during the evening weather report on WBAY). And then, after the final episode of the Great British Baking Show’s final episode last Friday, I wandered through Netflix land and discovered A Year in Space, 12 episodes (all running less than 15 minutes) that documented the record ISS residency of Scott Kelly and Mikhail “Misha” Kornienko.
I couldn’t turn it off.
Hmmm. Perhaps my waning interest was not the result of wandering interests or a depreciating attention span but rather the consequence of mundane story telling. Like everyone else today who is drowning in the media ocean were every drop vies for our clicking attention, I rarely waste my most valuable resource watching or reading anything that does not pique my curiosity and desire to learn more in the first chapter or episode.
Like I said, I could not turn off A Year in Space, and my wife was equally rapt.
Time Studios covered the year in a dozen episodes that are a visual master class in clear, concise, comprehensive, and compelling story telling. It revealed the personal side of the mission as well as the professional with an unbiased lens focused on the American and Russian protagonists.
The fascinating examination of the Russian space program was an unexpected surprise. Seeing Star City is much more interesting and telling than reading about it, especially when some of the people who work and live there are telling you about it. Despite some unspoken pleasure in remembering some of the Russian I learned in high school, subtitles thankfully told most of the story.
Near the end of the series A Year in Space introduced the aeromedical study that compared Scott Kelly with Mark, his identical twin who is also an astronaut, upon his return to Earth. Replaying visual vignettes from the series as I search here for the right words, it is clear that the series presented a wealth of information that felt as expansive as the space through with the ISS flies. The only claustrophobia came with the shots of the the three spacefarers crammed into the Soyuz capsule for their return to Earth. — Scott Spangler, Editor