THE “SENATE LAUNCH SYSTEM” MYTH

 

By Wes Oleszewski- Aero News Network spaceflight analyst

NASA has launched astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission to the moon in 2026 as planned. The Artemin II mission was boosted by the Space Launch System, also known by the acronym the “SLS.” Interestingly this shuttle-derived launch vehicle has gone through a rough political history in order to get to this point.

The date was January 14, 2004, when President George W. Bush announced his, “Vision for Space Exploration.” This was just 11 months and two weeks after the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. His directive called for the retirement of the Space Shuttle as soon as the International Space Station was completed. Thereafter, NASA was to press on to the Moon and Mars. Considering that the Shuttle would be retired, in order to achieve the President’s vision, NASA needed a booster that could loft more than the Shuttle’s 65,000 pounds of payload. Yet, NASA was also constrained to a very limited budget. So, building a whole new heavy lift booster from scratch was out of the question. Instead, it was decided to create a heavy lift booster using hardware adapted from the Shuttle Program.

Very shortly a new program was devised by NASA to meet the goals of President Bush’s “vision.” The program was called “Constellation” and a part of it was a heavy lift booster whose first stage was comprised of Shuttle hardware. Early on it was called the “Ares IV” and consisted of an extended Shuttle external tank with five RS-25 Shuttle main engines clustered on the bottom and two up-graded Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB) on each side. All of which made up the first stage. The second stage was a very vaporous concept which normally showed something between one and four Apollo-era style J-2 engines. Over time that second stage never managed to jell while other elements of Constellation constantly evolved. By about 2007 the heavy lift booster’s first stage settled in with two enlarged SRBs just four RS-25 engines and was renamed “Ares V.”

The Bush administration expired with the first month of 2009 and the Obama administration took power. Obama had started his bid to become president telling voters that if elected he would cancel all of NASA and “…give all of that money to education.” When it was discovered that he could not be elected without winning Florida, which had several thousand voters employed in the spaceflight business- he promptly switched his banter to saying that he now supported NASA. In his first budget, however, Obama simply provided no funds for NASA’s Constellation, or any other human spaceflight. Thus, all the nation’s plans for human space exploration would be deleted. Yet, the program still enjoyed wide support (about a 2 to 1 ratio) in both houses of Congress. Plus, considering that the nation had already spent more than eleven billion dollars on Constellation, the members of Congress were not going to let the nation’s spaceflight heritage simply be red-penned away.

Although the Obama administration continued to attempt to cancel NASA’s human spaceflight efforts, a series of Congressional bills were passed which blocked his administration’s efforts. Foremost in those Congressional orders was fulfillment of the need for a national heavy lift launch vehicle. From that effort NASA created the Space Launch System, or SLS. Nasa engineers then revived the basic form of the Ares V and turned it into a launch vehicle that could send astronauts to the Moon. The Trump administration revived the program and re-named it “Artemis.” That program sent a test version of the crew vehicle, known as Orion, to the Moon on November 26, 2022 and saw it return safely. On April 1, 2026, that same launch vehicle sent the first crew of astronauts since December of 1972, to the Moon.

Notice that nowhere in this history did the Senate design anything. There were no engineers sitting at design desks working with spaceflight or rocketry software and there never has been. That is NOT the job of the Congress. SLS was designed by NASA’s spaceflight contractors such as Boeing, Northrop Grumman, ULA and countless sub-contractors. To slur the vehicle by saying that SLS stands for “Senate Launch System” is not only a childish vilification but especially is a slap in the face to the honest engineers, managers and technicians who have struggled so long to bridge the eight-year long void created by the Obama administration. The Senate had nothing more to do with this vehicle other than approving and insuring funding- exactly as they do with every other major government program plus specifying that it must be a shuttle-derived vehicle. Thus, when term “Senate Launch System” is used anywhere, it is nothing more than a myth.