EM-1 Still on for Late 2018, SLS’ Second Flight Still A Mystery

Jeff Foust, reporting for SpaceNews:

One challenge for that schedule is the delayed delivery of the service module for the Orion spacecraft, which is being provided by the European Space Agency. While the service module recently completed its critical design review, there are still some technical issues being studied, Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said at the meeting.

“We had planned on getting the service module from the Europeans in January,” he said. “We will now get that service module more likely in April. We’re preparing for it to even be a little bit later than that.”

They chose to put European partners on the critical path to make cancelling SLS harder, but they also made launching harder. That’s a big delay overall (factoring in the delays that had led up to this point).

Gerstenmaier also talked about funding, specifically for ground systems:

That funding is needed for upgrades to support the Exploration Upper Stage, a new upper stage that NASA plans to use starting with the second SLS launch, no sooner than 2021. “We’ve really got to get started in ’17 to make a launch in August of 2021,” Hill said.

NASA still seems to be somewhat confused in their public statements about the SLS’ second flight. The Europa missions have been mandated to fly on SLS no later than 2022, per the FY 2016 budget, but some NASA representatives keep saying EM-2 is on the docket for 2021.

That could be the case, if the hardware for the Europa missions hit some delays (which is almost inevitable, given the unpredictable funding for those missions). I wonder if that’s why they’re planning SLS’ second launch no sooner than 2021—to be ready if and when they need to fly something with their hardware.

If EM-2 were to fly before the Europa missions, it would have to fly uncrewed—the astronaut office requires that no crew fly when a major propulsion system is used for the first time.

If the Europa missions get delayed to 2024-25, and EM-2 flies in 2021-22, that means we wouldn’t see crew launch on SLS until 2026 or later. It could be a decade until we see crew fly on SLS.

And I haven’t even brought up the fact that no one knows where the full funding is for the Exploration Upper Stage itself.