From a NASA presentation from November of 2011, some simple concept art of a number of the launch vehicles pondered for the SLS. I’m a bit out of the loop these days, but I’ve heard from several people working at NASA that there is very little faith there that the SLS will actually be built. Not that it’s technically very difficult, but that there’s simply no political will for such a vehicle. There is no current (or foreseen) program that would require this kind of lift capability… no manned moon, Mars, asteroid or new space station programs, so there’d be no political drive to build the launcher. And since there’s no launcher of this size… there’s no political will to have a manned moon, Mars, asteroid or space station program. Neat, huh?
I’m informed that those at NASA who are working on SLS are basically working under bureaucratic inertia. Congress mandated that NASA build the SLS, so NASA started studies; but Congress is flaky.
Another chart shows the baseline SLS compared to other launchers. Interestingly for a NASA chart, shown alongside such staples as the Shuttle and the Saturn V are things like the SpaceX Falcon series, the XCOR Lynx and the Masten XA-1.0.
And because why the hell not, it’s relevant…
In my own experience, stress calculations would have been a whopping improvement over *accounting,* which I got stuck doing for over a year. Gaaaaagggggghhhhh.