NASA SLS/Orion/Payloads
EDIT: Today is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 touching down on the Moon.
I have been overly critical of SLS and I think most of y'all have been too. Please, before citing Eric Berger (who has almost zero credibility) and going on your ridiculous anti-SLS rants. SLS will probably fly in late 2020/early 2021 and while LOPG and Orion may or may not be ideal they're what we've got, and without funding for Starship I think the Artemis Program is a worthwhile, conservative approach to get back
(from the Verge).
This demonstrates the absurdity of the claim of humans to Mars in 2022, or indeed 2024.
So think first orbital flight in the 2022/2024 time frame.
That said, this is entirely within the EM-2 time frame. This would certainly be the unmanned variant, as well, at least for the first tests, so SLS competition, but not Orion competition. Assuming that they end up doing coincident crew vehicle dev (their Dragon dev people have to do something, after all), then in the t
