The SLS rocket is the worst thing to happen to NASA—but maybe also the best?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was established by President Eisenhower. The United States put a lot of small satellites into space. The first man to land on the moon happened less than a decade later.

The NASA Authorization Act was signed by the president. The Space Launch System rocket was supposed to be ready for launch in 2016 by the law. It looked reasonable. NASA had been launching rockets for 50 years. The new SLS rocket was already constructed.

The launch vehicle's engines are the most difficult part. The engines from the space shuttle program were used for the SLS rocket. The side-mounted boosters would be slightly larger than the ones used in the shuttle. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel tanks would be housed in the large core stage of the vehicle. This component was not a direct descendant of the original component. The shuttle's external tank carried the same propellants for the shuttle's main engines as the core stage's 8.4 meter diameter.

Construction was hard. The program has been a mess from the beginning. The spread of jobs around to large contractors in the states of congressional committee leaders has been efficient. Lawmakers have overlooked years of delays, a more than doubling in development costs to above $20 billion, and the availability of far cheaper and reuseable rockets.

Twelve years have passed since the authorization act was signed and NASA is ready to launch the SLS rocket. The agency went from nothing to the moon in 11 years. It took 12 years for a rocket to be ready for a test flight.

I have a mixture of feelings.

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With the launch just days away, I am incredibly happy for the people at NASA and the space companies that have worked hard, cut through the bureaucracy, managed thousands of requirements, and actually got this rocket built. And I'm eager to see it fly. Who doesn't want to watch a huge, Brobdingnagian rocket consume millions of kilograms of fuel and break the surly bonds of Earth's gravity?

It's hard to celebrate a rocket that's responsible for a lost decade of US space exploration. The costs of the program have been huge. NASA has spent tens of billions of dollars on everything from the rocket to the ground systems. I think the opportunity costs are more expensive. For a decade, Congress pushed NASA's exploration focus towards an Apollo-like program, using 1970s technology in its engines, tanks, and boosters.

When the commercial space industry was ready to push toward sustainable spaceflight by building big rockets and landing them, NASA was told to look backwards. It's like Congress told NASA to keep printing newspapers.

It didn't have to be like that. A few visionary space policy leaders tried to stop the wastefulness but were defeated by the defense industry.

This is the end of an era for me as a journalist and writer. I want to tell the story about where this came from and where it's going as we approach the launch. I will argue that the SLS rocket is the worst thing that could happen to NASA.

The story can have a happy ending.