
NASA pushed back its Space Launch System (SLS) first launch goal to roughly June 2018 from its previous estimate of December 2017, a key official said Wednesday. NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier told a House panel the SLS program is about to manufacture hardware, which he called one of the more critical phases. Gerstenmaier said NASA will take another look at the program after the winter 2015 timeframe. “I think we’ve been able to balance…