NASA SLS FAILURE...! President Eisenhower signed the law establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on July 29, 1958. Less than 11 years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon. President Obama signed the NASA Authorization Act on October 11, 2010. Among its provisions, the law called on NASA to create the Space Launch System rocket and have it ready for launch in 2016. It seemed reasonable. And in some sense, this SLS rocket was already built. The most challenging aspect of almost any launch vehicle is its engines. No problem—the SLS rocket would use engines left over from the space shuttle program. Its side-mounted boosters would be slightly larger versions of those that powered the shuttle for three decades. The newest part of the vehicle would be its large core stage, housing liquid hydrogen, and oxygen fuel tanks to feed the rocket's four main engines. But even this component was derivative. The core stage's 8.4-meter diameter was identical to the space shuttle's external tank, which carried the same propellants for the shuttle's main engines. Alas, construction wasn't that easy. NASA's SLS rocket program has been a hot mess almost from the beginning. Lawmakers have overlooked years of delays, a more than doubling in development costs to above $20 billion. Now, here we are, nearly a dozen years after that authorization act was signed, and NASA SLS is still on the ground. What a disaster! NASA began developing the SLS in 2011, just after the cancellation of its Constellation moon program, which would have used an Ares rocket to send Orion to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon, and eventually Mars. Back then, the development of the giant rocket was budgeted at $10 billion, with an expected debut voyage in late 2016. But development costs, budget issues, design changes, political hurdles, and other bumps in the road delayed the rocket's first launch to 2016, 2017, then 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. In total, SLS has missed 24 times to launch. NASA SLS FAILURE...!