CASEY HANDMER: Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a ‘successful wet dress rehearsal’ despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface.

The “wet dress” was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a “(no) confidence test” on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.

The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they’ve had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.

Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world’s first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS’s botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!

Read the whole thing.

Despite rosier initial reports about yesterday’s WDR, Artemis II has a bad feel to it.