I'm John Batchel. I welcome my good colleague Bob Zimmerman, who keeps the website

behind the black.

It is February, and it is your generosity that sustains Bob's sharp opinions of commercial space and its success these last decades. So your subscription and your generosity most

appreciated for the rest of the month, we've got lots of news, so much news,

in fact. Bob and I were debating. Do we have to do all of it today? The answer is yes. Bob, a very

good evening to you. The subscriptions are coming in, and what they're going to learn is the Artemis

question marks. And you know in the past I've mentioned Jonah, which was a superstitious way of

talking about something's wrong on the ship. Somebody's bringing bad weather or bad consequences to us.

Who is it? Is there a Jonah on board as a general question about Artemis? The first dress

rehearsal was not satisfactory. What happened?

Good evening to you, Bob. Good evening, John. I don't believe in Jonas, as you know, because Jonas is a way

to kind of like make believe it's not your fault. And everything about SLS is NASA's fault.

Everything about, and politicians' fault. They mandated it, NASA came up with it, and

it's a horrible program. And not Artemis, but SLS and Orion in particular as part of this

program. And Artemis itself is, is clutched together foolishly to try to meet politicians' demands.

And so it carries with it a great deal of danger, as I've said

repeatedly. So the SLS, they want to launch the Artemis II mission manned, carrying four

astronauts for 10 days, zip around the moon and come back to Earth. That's the plan. And they

want before they, and they hope to do this launch in February they have a launch window that

extends into April so they set their first attempt the very first opportunity to give themselves

lots of time but before they can do the launch they have to do what they call a wet dress rehearsal

this is basically a dress rehearsal countdown in which you actually load the rocket with fuel

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