I Have been seeing a lot of hatred for the shuttle program shifting over to doubts about the SLS. The shuttle itself, besides being fairly limited in operation was not inherently bad or dangerous. What ended up killing the 2 crews were simple lapses of judgement at NASA that carried over to make disastrous consequences. For instance, Challenger disintegrated due to weather constraints, it was too cold and brittle that day to be launching on contained explosions. Icicles could be seen on the spacecraft beforehand and many people expressed concerns but nobody listened. Every reliable prop-driven plane just cannot operate well under weather constraints for example, and the same principle carries over to rockets. As for Columbia's reentry failure the loss of heat-shielding had been documented in many other cases back to the start of the program but the administration did little to address it, not to mention that in each case the spacecraft returned in one piece, that would have lead NASA to believe that it was not too great of a concern. If you want to hear a great tragedy then we should talk about Apollo I, 3 of the greatest Americans lost their lives because some engineers failed to remember about what can happen in a 100% Oxygen environment from their intro to chemistry class. If you in all simplicity fill a capsule with Oxidizer the end result should have been expected to be the same as if you put in through a rocket engine. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/images/smilies/k_undecided.gif The success or failure of the SLS and Orion in my opinion are all determined by the current leadership at NASA. Hopefully the administration has learned from their mistakes.