The Artemis II mission has been moved back again.
They keep postponing it by thirty days.
The whole thing is surprising: suddenly after donnie showed up again, with Epstein breathing down his neck, what had been an aspirational-only sort of "someday, sometime" project became "we are going in February" sort of mission.
And that mission utilizes as its spacecraft the most cobbled together collection of disparate components in the history of our space program.
As those components, various and disparate, keep "having problems" (Boeing being deeply imbedded, there keep being leaks and squeaks and mismatches) not surprisingly, "February" has become "later, probably March".
Since "whatever is wrong with things" has required transporting the skyscraping rocket back into the barn, "March" is probably early.
Transporting that thing across the ground at rocket transport creep takes a lot of time.
March is probably about as soon as it's going to be back in the barn.
Unless NASA wants to shoot the thing through the roof of the barn - possible since Boeing is a major contractor - they are going to need to crawl it back out to roof-free Florida to "try" to launch it.
Sometime.
Probably not March.
The more distant that launch, the better, from my point of view.
"Try" is a scary word to me, at least when it applies to the lives of four brave human beings who are willing to sit on the tip of what is, in the best of worlds, a bomb, and pray for "liftoff".
"Try" becomes an even more ominously fatal prediction when it is used in relation to the company that, back in 2019, wanted to stay the order from the FAA grounding its deathtrap Max 8 and instead, "collect more data"; two crashes killing everyone on board wasn't enough data; they wanted to see if the Max 8 kept crashing.
So, with Boeing in charge of a big piece of Artemus II, what has been the hold-up?
Artemis II is not failing because of one big flaw.
It’s the accumulation of:
Sounds like a situation needing more data, so let's "shoot 'em up there," says Boeing.
I have never felt worse, or more afraid, about a published thing that the United States is going to do.
donnie is going to attack Iran over breakfast someday soon and I can't do anything about it, but, on the other hand, I don't have a dog in that hunt.
So, I really don't care; he has already removed us from world leadership and achieved for us the alternate post of world buffoons.
To that end, attacking Iran is just donnie being donnie and I'm sure Karolynne Levitt is going to have a good rationale for the buffoonery.
Mike Johnson - speaking of buffoons - is tight with her (lotta tight liaisons in donnieLand - Kristi Noame even has a flying boudoir) so Congress must be on board.
But for our astronauts, I am afraid.
I'm afraid because a great Seattle company - a company of engineers and perfectionists - got taken over by a shareholder-value-tribe of bullshit-artists from St Louis, and people are dying and will continue to die, because those people - the ones who are dying and will continue to die - think Boeing is still Boeing, not what it has become: Proctor and Gamble trying to be spacemen.