So over at Ars Technica today, they answered a question that had been bugging me, and it was one of those questions that I didn't even know was really bugging me.

There was just something kind of kind of sticking to my brain about this.

Artemis won, the first test flight of the SLS and the Orion capsule for our return trip to the moon here with the Artemis program.

It's supposed to come back safely, splash down off the

coast of California, be recovered if all it goes well. And so far, everything is going well.

This has been about as perfect an unmanned mission as anybody could have hoped for. Everything is

just working perfectly. And knock on wood, it'll keep working perfectly. So why, after this brilliant

test flight, is it going to be at least two years before Artemis II flies? You would think,

hey, they know how to stack the rocket. They know how everything works. Why don't we just get

that thing on the launch pad, get those astronauts up in there and make this next man, the first man test flight? Well, the reason is about eight, nine years ago, there was a hundred million dollar hole in NASA's budget. And they figured out a way to plug that hole.

They're going to reuse eight black boxes, the avionics, from Artemis 1 in Artemis 2.

Oh, my God.

And it'll take them that long to get the parts out and it's plugged into the other... It's going to take them approximately 27 months to...

Kill it with fire.

Kill it with fire.

To remove, refurbish, and install these eight black boxes from Artemis 1 to Artemis 2.

Bill, have you... Do you read the comments on the space stuff at Ars Technica at all?

No.

There's something brilliant.

It's called a Wickwick event because you said Burn It with Fire.

A couple of years ago, there was a commenter to ours named Wickwick, who said that what he would really like to see happen with

the first SLS launch is for the whole thing to explode spectacularly.

...