\u201cMilestones and transitions\u201d<\/a>, The Space Review, October 4, 2010), it is worthwhile to reflect on what SLS has, and has not, achieved during that span. The Space Launch System by Anthony Young provides a detailed, but imperfect, overview of the development of the rocket through its first\u2014and, to date, still only\u2014flight.\n<\/p>\n\nYoung starts with a chronological approach reviewing the Constellation program and the debates early in the Obama Administration that led to cancelling Constellation while preserving Orion and turning the Ares rocket program into SLS. Later chapters explore various elements of the SLS, including the core stage, boosters, and upper stages, culminating with an account of the Artemis 1 mission in 2022.\n<\/p>\n
\nYoung relies primarily on news articles and official documents for much of the book\u2019s material, which turns some passages into fairly workmanlike, dry tick-tocks of various reviews and testing milestones. An exception is material from an interview with Garry Lyles, chief engineer of SLS, who provides insights particularly into the early development of the vehicle.\n<\/p>\n
\nThat includes a fairly blunt assessment of the approach to leverage shuttle-derived and other existing hardware to develop SLS, an approach advocates argued would be the fastest way to field the vehicle. \u201cThe biggest integration job on this vehicle was designing around existing hardware,\u201d Lyles recalled. That included the Orion spacecraft, despite it still being in development itself. \u201cThe only element that we could have complete control over was the core stage.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
SLS lies at one end of the spectrum of launch vehicle development: traditional contractors, traditional contracts, and an approach that calls for extensive analysis and testing before even thinking about a launch.<\/p>\n
\nWhile the book is in many respects comprehensive in tracking the development of the SLS, it has two flaws. One is a surprisingly poor job by the publisher editing of the book. In the first chapter alone, there are typos such as references to former NASA administrator \u201cDan Golden\u201d and former deputy administrator \u201cFred Gregor\u201d as well as the \u201cArea 1-X\u201d rocket. The chapter also mentions a proposed upper stage with a \u201c27.5 m diameter\u201d; from the context of that section, it should be 27.5 feet. It is disappointing that a major publisher like Springer did not perform a better copyedit of the book.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe other is that the book does not attempt to assess the state of the SLS program after a decade and a half. The book ends rather abruptly with a review of the \u201csuperlative performance\u201d of the rocket on Artemis 1 in 2022. The rocket did perform very well on Artemis 1, and it has neither been the cause of delays in Artemis 2\u2014caused by issues with Orion, particularly its heat shield\u2014nor is on the critical path for Artemis 3. But is that performance worth the tens of billions spent on the program since its inception?\n<\/p>\n
\nSLS lies at one end of the spectrum of launch vehicle development: traditional contractors, traditional contracts, and an approach that calls for extensive analysis and testing before even thinking about a launch. At the opposite end is SpaceX\u2019s Starship: a vertically integrated company using private funds and fixed-price contracts and a far more iterative approach that accepts, and even embraces, launch failures while testing. What is the right approach? The answer hopefully will become clear in the next few years.\n<\/p>\n
Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com<\/a>) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews<\/a>. He also operates the Spacetoday.net<\/a> web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.<\/p>\nNote: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 by Jeff FoustTuesday, September 2, 2025 The Space Launch System: NASA\u2019s Heavy-Lift Rocket and the Artemis I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-115752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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