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SLS was designed to push an entire landing stack to the moon, lifting about 95-100 mt to LEO. If it's now just pushing Orion / SM / ICPS, that is only about 50 mt to LEO. If the "standardized" upper stage is a Centaur derivative, that required mass to LEO would be even less. If these numbers...

That's rather my point - if they weren't beholden to the Apollo-era crawler and VAB, designing a pad complex with cranes and staging for stack assembly and access to components on the pad even for something as large as the SLS isn't technologically infeasible. SpaceX has bits of this capability...

Now witness the waterpower of this fully plumbed and operational space bidet!

It's a nuisance that they can't physically access much of the stack while it is on the pad. It'd be neat if they could put the VAB on wheels and make it like the ULA mobile service tower.

Can Starliner (on paper) go anywhere beyond LEO? If there isn't a destination in LEO after ISS is de-orbited, what's the point? Maybe that, but more likely there are proprietary technologies that Boeing doesn't want shared with competing aerospace firms. Though, if I were in the aerospace...

It also went as the Shelby Launch System after Senator Shelby from Alabama. He was ranking member and later chair of the senate appropriations committee and he made sure any NASA pork projects that could send money to Alabama continued to do so, whether they were a good idea or not.

Catching the booster stage on the barge, that's a cool concept. No lost payload due to landing leg mass, stabilizes and holds the stage in a very flexible cable arrangement. It seems that they were hoping to attempt a catch but they deferred for a soft landing, or was that the plan to soft land...

Good thing we don't have to worry about that sort of thing on Artemis...oh...

They might be very close to an all-up Apollo 9 -style mission, maybe even circumlunar like Apollo 8. They may not beat Artemis II to go around the moon, but it seems that their lander and capsule are both nearly ready for crew.

He already used up Models S,3,X,Y --> SEXY (the stable genius is mentally a 12-year-old). Expect something stupidly meme-y.

Well, there are no roads, traffic laws, pedestrians (that we are aware of), or leaves on the moon or Mars, so if FSD were to happen anywhere I'd think these would be the easiest places to do it. I'd still bet it would still get confused by snow on Mars, manage to crash into a NASA rover...

Or not enough.

Maybe he uses X as a Roman numeral?

Just as soon as Starship stops exploding, and they find people willing to ride the thing, well, anywhere.

And I think a lot of people are questioning why we need to go back to the moon at all. Artemis is a vanity project at best right now.

Fueling test looks like it is going well. First and second stage tanks are filled and are in replenishment mode.