Much hard work remains between now and the 2018 launch. But any delays to the first SLS mission will not be due to the rocket, but rather the Orion capsule and its European-built service module. NASA was assigned a job, and the agency has done it.

My five years of covering SLS in depth comes down to this: we could choose to continue to litigate past decisions and pretend we live in a world where policymakers make rational decisions. Or, we can accept the facts on the ground, which are self-evident in a place like Michoud. The SLS is a thing. It can be touched. By all accounts it is going to fly, and it will give NASA a powerful capability no other country or space agency in the world can match.

And if the SLS becomes a tool in the US spaceflight arsenal, we need to hold those responsible for its existence accountable. If Congress won’t cancel SLS and put the future of US rocketry into the hands of private companies, then they damned well need to use their new tool responsibly. Building a large rocket is not enough. NASA must tell the new president, Congress, and the American public what it intends to use SLS for, in detail, and how much those missions will cost. Then Congress must write a check.

On Thursday, Science released a half-dozen papers that analyzed data the Dawn mission sent home from the largest body in the asteroid belt, a dwarf planet called Ceres. Headlines will focus on signs of water ice and a possible ice-powered volcano, but the reports themselves really end up emphasizing how much we still don’t know about the strange world. Despite all of Dawn’s imaging, many features don’t add up to a coherent picture of the body as a whole.

Before Dawn got there, our impression of Ceres was dominated by what we’d measured of its density. Those measurements suggested the dwarf planet has a substantial amount of water and is large enough to have differentiated, allowing rocky material to sink to the core. So we expected Dawn to find an icy world where viscous ice has gradually wiped away many of the indications of the impacts every Solar System body has suffered.

That’s not at all what Dawn found. Instead, only the largest impact craters on Ceres seem to show any sign of viscous changes. This lack of viscous change suggests that Ceres’ crust is much more rigid than it would be if it were comprised of water ice.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if our future looks like what artists have dreamt up for us or not. It’s the ideas and seeds that they plant that make us believe such things could exist that matter. Would the helicopter exist if Leonardo da Vinci hadn’t inspired us with the design of the aerial screw? Impossible to say, but at every step of our journey into space artists have been there to show us the possibilities, pushing at the boundaries of what mankind is capable of with their imagination and artistic skill, laying out the path to possible futures, and providing inspiration to generations of scientists, engineers, and explorers.