Trevor Mahlmann On a chilly night in early December 2017, I met some industry sources at a restaurant in southeast Houston called Nobi. Right below the Johnson Space Center, Nobi serves Vietnamese cuisine and has an amazing selection of beers on tap. We participated. These figures in the space industry are not well known outside of the business, but they are very knowledgeable and keen observers of spaceflight. And perhaps most importantly for me as a reporter, they were particularly honest in this environment. He was in town for a space conference so we gossiped and chatted and talked shop. Deep in our cup, speculation turned to NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. When, I asked, do you really think the big rocket will be launched? One of these sources responded with a surprising prediction. “Probably around 2023,” he said. At the time, NASA was planning a 2019 launch date for the rocket, just two years away. The material was almost complete. So a prediction of six years of work left seemed pretty out of left field. But I was slightly drunk, and what’s Twitter for if not a little kibitzing? So I grabbed my phone and tweeted his prediction: An unbiased industry source said tonight that the first launch of the SLS will likely be around 2023. — Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) December 5, 2017 The prediction didn’t garner much attention at the time and was largely dismissed as a bad joke. But as the years have passed, in certain little corners of the internet, this tweet has become something of an internet legend, a wild prediction that might come true. Advertising
It has also drawn ire from supporters of NASA’s big rocket. In 2020, the r/SpaceLaunchSystem subreddit discovered the tweet, and some readers were completely outraged. User “insane_gravy” wrote, “Eric Berger once again proves that anyone can be a space ‘journalist’ because there are no standards.” Well, I hope insane_gravy really likes the gravy, because the Space Launch System rocket and the Artemis I mission are now scheduled to launch on Wednesday, just eight days before Thanksgiving. However, improbably, the source has been proven correct. Given that we are less than two months away from the new year, it is already “around” 2023. Besides, the 2023 year started five weeks ago.

A second prediction

Three years later, in October 2020, this same source made another statement wild enough that I decided to re-tweet about it. The prediction was about NASA’s impending decision on a contractor to build a “Human Landing System” to land its astronauts on the Moon as part of the Artemis program. At the time, SpaceX, a “National Team” led by Blue Origin, and a third bidder led by Dynetics were competing for one or two NASA contracts. The conventional thinking in the space industry was that Blue Origin would win the prime contract after leading a group of new and traditional aerospace companies and proposing a design tailored to NASA’s specifications. It was thought that perhaps Dynetics or SpaceX would have a secondary contract. Far from proposing a conventional lunar lander, SpaceX wanted to use its massive Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. This option was somewhat rejected by the space industry because Starship was an experimental, risky approach. There were also concerns that if NASA chose SpaceX, it would put Starship on a critical path for the Artemis Moon program. This meant that for the Artemis program to succeed, the Starship had to work. And if Starship worked, it would mean that NASA had funded a rocket that was better than its own expendable and costly Space Launch System rocket.