Official schedule just slipped to April 2023 for EM2. Like Constellation, it’s slipping more than a year per year. The program began in 2005. That would make it eighteen years.
Breakdown of Orion costs dating to 2005 ish: $5.8b under Constellation program, $4.5b since Constellation canceled, $6.77b through 2023.
Another piece at The Space Review I missed last week was Jeff Foust’s assessment of the presidential field in the context of space policy.
Bottom line: None of them are going to be a JFK. Which isn’t surprising, because even JFK wasn’t the JFK of space-advocate fantasies. We live in a democratic Republic, and we’re not going to do Apollo again, to Mars or anywhere else. The best we can hope for is a president who recognizes the value of high-leverage space technology needed to reduce costs, and will fund those things necessary to support it during his or her term.
I’m a little behind on my reading of The Space Review, but last week, Eric Sterner cautioned (as Keith Cowing has been doing repeatedly) space enthusiasts not to imagine that the movie will somehow sell NASA programs or budgets. Note the discussion about lack of redundancy in comments. Weir’s scenario assumes that NASA is going to do Apollo to Mars. The purpose of my Kickstarter project is to show why that shouldn’t and probably won’t ever happen. And there’s also this:
“There is no indication of” does not mean that “it didn’t happen.” We just don’t know, though I suspect the FBI is finding out. But the epistomelogical problems with the reporting on this have been intense.