Okay so I did the thing again yesterday where I told myself I'd just check the NASA stream "for a minute" during breakfast and then didn't move from the couch until almost 11am. The Artemis I launch, the first attempt to get the Space Launch System off the pad with an uncrewed Orion capsule strapped to the top, was supposed to go at 8:33am Eastern on Monday. It didn't.
I want to say I'm surprised but I've been doing this since the shuttle days, back when this blog was basically me copy-pasting mission patch nicknames into posts nobody read. Scrubs are just what happens with big rockets. Still stings a little every time.
The short version: engine No. 3 of the four RS-25 engines on the core stage wouldn't cool down to the temperature it needed to hit before ignition, something like -420°F, and the bleed test they ran to get there kept coming back wrong. NASA's working theory by the end of the stream was a bad sensor rather than an actual engine problem, which is almost worse in a way, because now you've scrubbed a launch over a part that might just be lying to you. There was also a hydrogen leak earlier in the tanking process and some cracked foam on an intertank flange that got flagged along the way, because apparently rockets can have more than one thing wrong with them at once, who knew.
Small aside: I refreshed the NASASpaceflight forum probably forty times during the hold. That community moves faster than the actual NASA commentary half the time and somebody always has a scanner feed of the range safety loop going. Ten bucks says whoever runs that thread is more tired than the launch director by the time this program is done.
Anyway. Here's the part that got me thinking past just "aw, scrubbed, whatever." NASA's own inspector general put out a report back in the spring saying each of the first four Artemis launches is going to run around $4.1 billion, and that's not even counting the many billions already sunk into SLS and Orion development over the last decade-plus. Four point one billion. Per launch. For a rocket that flies, as far as anyone's committed to publicly, maybe once a year if things go well. I did some deeply unscientific napkin math sitting there waiting for the scrub call and worked out that was something like 45 million dollars an hour just for this one static, un-launched morning, assuming you spread the whole program cost across the mission timeline in the dumbest possible way. That's not a real number. It's not supposed to be a real number. It's just the kind of thing you start calculating when you've been on a couch for three hours watching a countdown hold at T-minus 40 minutes.
I'm not anti-SLS, to be clear. I like big dumb rockets as much as the next person who grew up on Apollo documentaries and a dad who kept every issue of a certain space magazine in the garage. But there's something a little uncomfortable about watching an agency spend that kind of money on a rocket built largely from Shuttle-era leftover parts and legacy contractor relationships, in the same week SpaceX is flying Falcon 9 boosters for the fourth or fifth time each for a fraction of the cost per launch. Different mission profiles, I know. Orion needs more power off the pad than anything Falcon can lift, and Starship isn't rated for crew yet either. Still. The math bugs me and I don't think that makes me unreasonable.
NASA said pretty quickly after the scrub that they think the issue is fixable and they're targeting another attempt in a few days, pending a review of the data. I won't pretend I know if that holds. Launch schedules are basically vibes until the rocket is actually off the ground. If they get another crack at it soon I'll probably be right back on the couch with my coffee, because that's apparently who I am now, a grown adult who rearranges a Monday morning around a livestream of a rocket not going anywhere.
Worth watching either way, honestly, even the scrub. You don't get many chances to watch dozens of engineers on a NASA loop calmly troubleshoot a several-billion-dollar machine in real time and just call it for the day. There's something almost soothing about how undramatic the whole abort process actually is. No sirens, no fireballs, just a very calm voice saying "we're go for scrub" and a countdown clock resetting itself to zero.