ICPS and Orion
The Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, seen here attached to an Orion spacecraft, will fly on the first SLS mission, but future uses remain uncertain.

NASA is stopping work, at the request of Congress, on human-rating the initial upper stage for the Space Launch System, even as the agency argues that its funding projections require it to use that upper stage on crewed missions.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...