NASA Announces SLS/Orion Flight Slide

OK, it's official. NASA has owned up to the claim by GAO that there
is no way they can have first flight of SLS/Orion in 2018, whether it
is manned or not.

NASA had been claiming that first flight would be in November of 2018.
However, they've now agreed that that is simply going to be
impossible. The ESA Service Module won't deliver until at least
August of this year and it will take a full year of integration and
test once it delivers before a complete Orion vehicle can be delivered
for SLS integration. They require at least four months of vehicle
integration at the Cape after they receive a complete Orion vehicle.

So even if the other schedule challenges (ground infrastructure,
mission support) evaporate, EM-1 won't launch until first quarter
2019. In actuality, NASA is not going to set a new schedule until
this September (at which point they'll know whether ESA met the August
delivery date).

Issues are even larger for a manned mission. I read recently that
NASA has a space suit problem (as in they don't have any that are
suitable). NASA currently has eleven working space suits, four of
which are on ISS and the rest of which are used to support those four
with test and such. After several hundred million dollars spent, NASA
has no follow-on suits. They trying to build something out of old
Space Shuttle suits to cover things in the interim.

Is this any way to run a high tech effort? This sounds like what I've
seen on all too many projects, where no one wants to admit to needing
a slide until they absolutely cannot avoid it and then they take the
minimum slide possible. What this means is nobody else can adjust
their development to a new longer schedule, so things get taken out to
make schedule then there isn't time to put them back when the slide
becomes official, so you get a death spiral of a thousand small cuts.


--
"We come into the world and take our chances.
Fate is just the weight of circumstances.
That's the way that Lady Luck dances.
Roll the bones...."
-- "Roll The Bones", Rush