Ha! That alone (a tendency toward putrid emanations from the derrière) would disqualify me from ever becoming an astronaut.
Isaacman scuttles a bunch of programs, lied about it last week (it was planned), waited until just before legislative markup to spring it. MOST TRANSPARENT 
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced at 5 pm Tuesday that the SLS Block 1B and Block 2 are cancelled, along with EUS, BOLE, ML-2, and most likely Gateway. All of which are at advanced stages of hardware production.
Now apparent this was done in an attempt to avoid the tsunami of resistance that will emerge from within NASA and the space engineering community, as well as the media. Isaacman knew this on Friday but refused to answer direct questions. The announcement was made at the last minute ahead of the Wednesday markup hearing in Congress. People are now scrambling to contact their representatives.
For all his talk of transparency and wanting what’s best for NASA, Isaacman is a typical Trump appointee. Huge disrespect for the NASA rank and file who have devoted years to these projects. None of them were consulted, and now they’ve been instructed to stop work but not discuss it with their industry counterparts or the media. It’s going to be siloed and blacked out, with people risking their jobs if they speak up. Truly despicable.
The reality is that billions of dollars are being literally thrown out the window, to protect the SpaceX HLS project which has no mockups, no test articles, and no hardware produced, after 6 years. And which has forced the Artemis 3 mission to abandon a lunar landing. That is not the fault of EUS or ML-2, as Isaacman has claimed. Both are on track for delivery with active hardware production. HLS has bupkus. Pure bullshit.
SLS/ Artemis have long been held to be boondoggles. Were we really going to go back to the moon on a rocket that costs four billion dollars per launch? A rocket that had to use the Gateway concept because it couldn’t launch a direct to the moon mission Apollo style? Using a capsule that may have serious, even irredeemable design flaws? People have been calling for its cancellation for years now, but no one had the political courage to bite the bullet.
I concede that Starship is behind schedule and unproven, but at least it still has potential; we KNOW that SLS is an Edsel.
For anyone interested, here’s an undated analysis by the great Richard Feynman about manned missions to Mars. His conclusion: A manned mission to Mars is not like a manned mission to the moon; it’s fundamentally and mathematically different. The biggest factor is the exponential increase in fuel requirements, and when you consider the enormous amount of fuel that has to be carried to Mars for the return trip, plus the limited launch windows that would require about a 500-day stay on Mars or else you have an even bigger fuel problem. Plus the hazards of living on the Martian surface including cosmic ray bombardment, and taking all those factors into account Feynman concludes that a return trip to Mars is essentially impossible, at least not without radically new technology that we presently cannot even imagine. Or, in short, Elon Musk is an idiot and his Mars fantasy is just one of many harebrained schemes that will go nowhere.
It’s not really a video, but a voice recording, and is about 37 minutes long.
I haven’t listened to that particular video, but I’ve seen the same “video” with Kaku’s, Tyson’s, and Cox’s voice, and I suspect it’s AI-generated–but not disputing the points they raise on why it just ain’t gonna happen.
Who says you have to carry every drop of fuel you’ll need to get back from Mars there in the first place? Every plan I’ve read about in recent decades to explore Mars relies on in-situ fuel production. Yes that creates some overhead and is an additional technological step to be mastered, but it shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.
ETA: A lot of these nay-saying criticisms of space travel have some pretty dubious built-in assumptions. One example is the idea that we’ll launch a 500+ day mission blind without ever having tested things out or tried more limited first steps. The simplest test run I can think of for a Mars mission is a stay at Sun-Earth L2 for the duration of a Earth-Mars or back transit. This could be cut short and the crew return to Earth at any time if problems arose.
With what fuel? The cryogenics used by Starship won’t last long before boiling off.
Has there ever been any proposed Mars mission whatsoever that didn’t rely on cryogenic storage? Certainly not all the nuclear powered liquid hydrogen fueled rocket concepts. I presume that rocket engineers haven’t been overlooking the problem for sixty years. If anything, liquid methane and liquid oxygen should be vastly easier to store long term than liquid hydrogen; 90 Kelvin versus 20 Kelvin.
Boiloff with Starships is a known, unsolved problem. Proposed solutions involve throwing more mass at it, lowering potential payload.
Why the focus/hate on Starship? It’s a problem for anyone who wants to send a manned mission to Mars, as I said previously.
So instead of sending thousands of tons of fuel to Mars in order for astronauts to be able to return, you’re sending a few billion tons of equipment in the hope of being able to extract rocket fuel from the Martian soil?
Sounds good to me. I’d love to invest in this venture because it has a sure payoff!
Not billions of tons, no. The fuel would be made by reacting CO2 from Mar’s atmosphere with hydrogen to produce methane and water– the latter then electrolyzed for oxygen and some of the needed hydrogen. Hopefully the hydrogen could be locally sourced, there’s ice on Mars, and overall the hydrogen is something like 1/20th of the total fuel&oxidizer mass needed. The whole point is that in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is an investment: if you make it work then supporting multiple returns back from Mars becomes vastly easier.
Shrug, I am not trying to be argumentative or an ass but why are you so investing in some AI generated slop from the internet on a topic you know almost nothing about. (A few billion tons to extract rocket fuel firmly puts you in that category.)
Or is this is just another rant about how evil Elon Musk is? I think you would have more success just starting there as almost no one on this board is going to disagree with you. His personal morals\politics are abhorrent.
Update - Mike Finke (the astronaut who had medical emergency) reveals he could not speak for 20 minutes – it wasn’t heart attack or choking.
Brian
Some new information out:
The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station. Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground… Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward.
What isn’t made clear is if it was some sort of problem with his throat or if it apparently neurological.