Enlarge / Image from Boeing’s Watch US Fly website. (credit: Boeing)
Recently, Boeing created a website called “Watch US Fly” to promote its aerospace industry—a grab bag of everything from Chinese tariffs to President Trump’s visit to the company’s facilities in St. Louis. Among the most intriguing sections is one that promotes the company’s Space Launch System rocket and argues that SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy booster is “too small” for NASA’s deep exploration program.
“The Falcon Heavy launch turned heads in February, but SpaceX’s rocket is a smaller type of rocket that can’t meet NASA’s deep-space needs,” the website states. “Once the Boeing-built SLS is operational, it will be the most powerful rocket ever built.”
The Boeing site backs up this claim by quoting NASA’s Bill Gerstenmaier, who talked about the differences between the SLS rocket and Falcon Heavy at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council meeting in March. Gerstenmaier, the chief of NASA’s human spaceflight program, said the SLS had “unique capabilities” that the Falcon Heavy rocket does not have. However, as Ars reported at the time, Gerstenmaier actually struggled to explain why NASA needed the SLS rocket because the space agency has not yet built anything that will take advantage of those capabilities.
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