The new NASA rocket is mainly valuable as a job machine for the time being

With a little imagination it could almost be felt: the violent roar of the engines under the gigantic SLS rocket, the most powerful rocket that the American space agency NASA has ever built.

But mission Artemis 1 failed. The technological stress test for the missions that should culminate in the first woman and first person of color on the lunar surface – at the earliest in 2025 – has been postponed. As if it was an ordinary scheduled flight with technical problems. Leaking pipes that were supposed to pump liquid hydrogen into the rocket and an engine that wouldn’t get to the right temperature threw a spanner in the works last week.

‘Bizarre how complex that still is’, someone wrote to me on Twitter. ‘Was that also the case with the Apollo missions?’, asked another. ‘If we put that Artemis mission on the front page, it still hasn’t left’, a colleague sighed at the beginning of this week. And a friend texted: ‘I’m fine. Did they select astronauts with a fear of heights?’ (No people are going on this first mission, by the way).

Understandable. Because Nasa, isn’t that the impeccable organization with a subscription to technological delights? The club that can land a robot cart on planet Mars and send spectacular HD images of it to Earth?

True, but it is also the club that, since the last Space Shuttle mission in 2011, has only been able to transport astronauts to the International Space Station on Russian rockets. Until the company SpaceX helped them with a new commercial shuttle service in 2019.

The SLS missile is also a political product, born in the benches of the US Congress. That is why the rocket has turned out to be many times more valuable so far as a job machine then as a ferry to the cosmos. The Artemis missions keep workers engaged from 3,800 subcontractors across literally every US statewith the center of gravity in the states of the greatest political advocates of the missile.

You can also see that political fingerprint in the fact that SLS reuses old Space Shuttle engines. They are cheaper and have already been proven to be functional, although that choice of rocket also puts old technology in new pockets. So that the SLS can meet the challenges of a previous generation of space travel, including the hydrogen leaks that nearly delayed the launch of Apollo 11, the mission of the first step on the moon, in 1969.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is working on a modern heavy rocket, which, for example, has replaced liquid hydrogen with the somewhat less moody methane. That Starship Launch System can be the same when finished, and is expected to cost a fraction of the ‘new’ NASA rocket. If the launch of the SLS is postponed even more often – the next attempt is expected at the end of October – it might be ready for use even earlier.

Also in the conquest of the cosmic, it appears once again, earthly arguments are usually leading.