I haven’t talked much about this, but Bob Zimmerman has thoughts.

I’ve been working on this behind the scenes for a couple years, in both DC and London, and some of the ideas in the accords may be based on my IAC paper from last fall, but these are much more limited than my proposals there. They don’t really “supercede” the OST; the administration’s position is that they are not in violation of it, and that it is “permissive” in that regard.

Eric Berger has the story:

NASA is taking a two-pronged approach toward the Artemis program. The agency has a clear mandate from the White House to land humans on the Moon by 2024. This has been criticized by some as a “political” date, but supporters of the fast timeline say it has injected needed urgency into the program. At the same time, NASA also wants to avoid the pitfalls of the Apollo Program—which flew six missions to the Moon and then ended due to high costs—by designing Artemis to be sustainable for the long term.

Unfortunately, as long as NASA is forced to continue to use SLS, that’s an impossible goal. Speaking of which, they just awarded a contract to AJR for $100M/engine.

Plus, Eric has a story on the uncertainty of launch architectures.

[Monday-morning update]

OK, so it’s not a hundred million per engine. It’s $146M.

[Bumped]