I vividly remember standing at the launch pad, a day before the launch, listening to Bolden and other officials offer encomiums about the spacecraft and where it would take NASA. These were the days of the “Journey to Mars,” when NASA was supposedly building the capabilities to land humans on Mars in the 2030s. NASA’s timelines, even then, seemed slow. The first flight of Orion and the SLS rocket was to take place in 2017. That estimate was only off by five years, with each year of delay costing about $4 billion. As for the first crewed flight of Orion,…