We need a constitutional amendment to fix this sort of thing, but while you could probably get enough states on board, you’d never get two thirds of Congress to do it. It was a rare moment of agreement between AOC and Ted Cruz. I hope that Trump vetoes this abomination, and tells them to try again.
Six years after its maiden (and only) flight, Eric Berger has some thoughts.
[Update a few minutes later]
From a comment over there:
Probably the most salient points:
A mockup lacking many critical systems flew into space once, six years ago.
The next test flight is basically another mockup, lacking even life support systems.
The first full-up complete vehicle launch is supposed to be with crew trusting their lives to a vehicle which has never been flight tested with systems complete, and also a similarly never-flown service module. Because for all the expense and mass, Orion doesn’t have much duration without a service module.
NASA safety culture at work. Mountains of paperwork instead of actual testing on actual hardware.
Just getting this far on Orion has been 15 years and $24B.
Ridiculous pork capsule to match a ridiculous pork rocket in the SLS.
Welp, I gave up on rescuing that installation, and built a new one with the latest version on a spare 250G SSD. It only took me a couple hours to reinstall most of the software I need, including my virtual Windows machine, which is a lot less time than I wasted trying to get the other one to boot. I also built a shell script to make it easier next time (and we know there will be a next time).