Opinion | The Last Gasp of 20th-Century NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is stuck in the past. NASA halted its planned first launch of its Space Launch System moon rocket Monday, owing to a failure of one of its four first-stage rocket engines. Those RS-25 engines, which NASA decided to refurbish and use as a cost-saving measure, are left over from the space-shuttle program. Building a new launch vehicle with obsolete technology is emblematic of NASA’s approach to this late, overbudget program.

SLS was developed to replace Constellation, the George W. Bush-era plan to repeat the Apollo moon-landing program. The giant booster NASA proposed was faulted as far too costly by an expert committee chaired by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, and the Obama administration planned to terminate it. Senate heavyweights, contractors already working on the Constellation and longtime NASA employees came up with SLS as a supposedly lower-cost replacement by using the same aerospace technology already under contract for Constellation.