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NASA Names New Spaceship 'Orion'
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's new spaceship that will carry astronauts to the moon and later to Mars has been officially named Orion. NASA confirmed the name after it was accidentally leaked to the media. Previously called the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), Orion will be NASA's main human spaceflight vehicle after the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. Orion was named after one of the brightest constellations in the entire sky. Earlier this year, the rocket that will launch Orion was named Ares I, and the heavy-lift rocket was named Ares V. NASA hopes the new names will become as familiar as Apollo and Saturn V."
to beware orion's belt
2^3 * 31 * 647
I suppose it's fitting. We got the shuttle Enterprise after Star Trek, now Orion after Stargate? However, I have a feeling it's going to be less reliable than Ancient technology.
Further, you already rejected this story:
Astronaut leaks NASA's newest moon vehicle name Wednesday August 23, @08:30AM Rejected
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
http://gateworld.net/omnipedia/ships/links/orion.
Oh look, some straws... I must clutch at them wildly.
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Project Orion is already well known as the name of a hypothetical propulsion method that uses nuclear explosions to literally blast the vehicle forward. As this new project seems entirely unrelated it's a bit inappropriate to take this name. The original Project Orion has had that name for decades and it's had a few reputable names behind it so we're not just talking about stealing a name from some crackpot's pet project.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
NASA commanders will now be called Master :)
We're being jerked around with "we can put a crew in orbit" instead of working on high speed probe drives and planetary exploration.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Nah, "Masters of Orion".
The orion project with directed nuclear propulsion is well...sort of over. If we maintained such religious dedication and respect for all names, then we wouldn't really be able to name anything at all.
This is a troll response I admit. Seriously, we need to name it something. Orion sounds just fine to me, it has a nice ring to it.
What about the video game series: Masters of Orion. I loved MOO3 for quite a while, despite it's debilitating and stupid AI that made the game unplayable. After a few hundred turns...it got to be a bit stupid as you simply could not avoid war.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
You only THINK the men at NASA are running the show.
BeatlesBeatles probably beat you to it!
One of the best Metallica songs ever, track 7 on Pastor of Muppets.
Some correlation between Masters of Orion and the song Orion being on Master of Puppets?
They want to have people in it in orbit by 2014, 8+ years of development time. Didn't Apollo go from nothing to guy on the moon in about the same timeframe?
Is this Space Cowboys 2.0 or Apollo 2.0?
Pastor of Muppets!?!?
I'd think this was more like 'The Thing That Should Not Be' considering other projects NASA could be spending this money on...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
....all of them buxom green women in bikinis.
Where were you when the voynix came?
The Project Apollo mission patch (image at http://www.goroadachi.com/etemenanki/apollo-logo.j pg)has the constellation of Orion in "A" in the center of the patch, so Orion is a continuation of the Apollo legacy and a commitment to the return to the Moon.
Michael
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
Not near as much use for them when you find out you can go between worlds by jumping through water-filled rusty hoops.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Didn't Apollo go from nothing to guy on the moon in about the same timeframe?"
Yeah, but the fact that it was even that long had to do with Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick fighting over script details and actors. It took them a while to secure Dykstra for the effects, too.
Where were you when the voynix came?
And besides, yes, name is nice, but could they instead have a short description of major design choices they are considering ? Or why a particular characteristics (mass, size, shape) were settled on ?
Come on, "science" article that talks about a name choice - get a grip !
RUN run Run run Run.
Pant Pant Pant Pant Pant.
SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT.
(Bursts through door)
"It's called Orion!"
"We Know."
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
The Orion Express.
-
Ok. Next time I keep it for myself.
.oO0(?)
Or maybe that's just what Aurora called the model...
"The Project Apollo mission patch..."
Where be the official mission pegleg, matey? Arrrrr!!!!!
Where were you when the voynix came?
Probably should have been called "Apollo 2.0", but that would have been embarassing.
The names for the boosters, "Aries I" and "Aries V", aren't that great either. There's already been an "Aries I" booster, used for a missile defense test in 1992.
Here's the General Accounting Office analysis of the program. GAO says it's already in trouble, and it hasn't even really been started yet. That's so NASA.
"The names for the boosters, "Aries I" and "Aries V", aren't that great either. There's already been an "Aries I" booster, used for a missile defense test in 1992."
The name's already been worn out, and does not represent anything flashy, visionary, or forward-looking at all.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Back in the 1950's and 1960's, there was a project to develop a nuclear spaceship named Orion. The basic principle was to operate it by detonating nuclear weapons some 60 m behind the spaceship... over and over and over again. Probably the closest you could ever be to multiple nuclear blasts and expect to live.
The flipside, however, would have been payload and velocities that would otherwise be way beyond human technology -- we're talking manned mission to Pluto without the crew missing Christmas at home.
As usual, Wikipedia has an excellent article on the whole thing...
What with Big Blue buying the space station an all...
JADBP
Interresting choice of names Wikipedia article about project Orion
I hardly think it is appropriate for NASA to have a Captain of Orion when "Master of Orion" obviously outranks him/her.
Time to start that grassroots letter-writing campaign! Where's my petition-drafting pen?
The Stephen Colbert Rocket!!
Cause we know it was GWB that named:
This ain't even fun.
I like the guy less than most, but Jesus-Jumping-on-a-Pogo-Stick-Christ, how in the blazes did you connect GWB with Orion? Are you one the unreasoning crowd that have to find some sort of Bush-evil in everything that happens?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
..it's a friggin capsule FerCrynOutLoud!
So that's the best that the Constellation Program could come up with?
Guess we're back to "The Right Stuff", where chimps get stuffed into the capsule and blast off into the wild black nothing..!
Just hope them spaceship pilots don't need to take manual control upon reentry and divert to an alternate landing strip.
Oh wait, theres no wings, no rudder, and the only airfoil is a blunt cone...
Orion was the name of the passenger ship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yeah, all that other stuff, too, but how much you want to bet they named it after the original fictional spacecraft?
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
A grim warning to all of us about the dangers of complex technology, miniaturization, standardization, passage of time, and making things too easy...
We're dumbing ourselves down to the point that no single person is fully capable of understanding all of the technology that is currently in place. We're just consumers of existing technology and we may add some little bit to existing technology, but we never fully understand all of the current technology well enough to reimplement it.
Here are some examples:
Take the "A conneticut yankee in King Arthur's court" example: Many smart mechanically inclined people could go back in time and using basic materials, they could recreate many modern innovations like electric motor, battery, internal combustion engine, simple airplane, FM radio, etc.
But... now take the "post-apocalyptic, only a few survivors left to rebuild the world" example: I'd wager that nearly NOBODY could recreate even a simple CPU, a digital watch, a TV, an ipod, a cellular phone, the internet, a spacecraft.
I'm reminded of when I was traveling through southern Thailand in 1993 and my 486/dx2/100 laptop broke. Many people in the local cities had cell phones, but almost no other technology or understanding of it existed locally. I finally found a computer store, went in, looked around at their old 286 motherboards lying around, showed them my laptop and asked if they could fix it, and they just gazed at it as if I had brought them a piece of a UFO.
Or look at the challenges of reading old video formats, old tape archive formats, old floppy disks that were written on sligtly miscalibrated drives, old hard drives that use interfaces not currently available, old file formats that are no longer popular and no longer easy to convert... there are a lot of ways we can lose massive amounts of information that most people no longer learn/study/know.
I'm just saying that if even NASA can lose skills and knowledge about their core business, then it can happen to others as well, and it could happen on a much larger scale.
Orion Pictures
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
So they're going to name it 'Orion'.
Will it have option mounts?
Also, the ability to double its engine output could really come in handy in the event of a booster failure, or when hefting a heavy payload to GTO.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Supposedly the smaller Ares 1 will lift 25 tons to LEO (Low Earth Orbit). I think it's foolish to ignore that currently the Atlas V Heavy design could do the same for 20 tons of payload. If NASA had slightly scaled down its ambitions, it could use current commercial technology. No real design costs needed for the launch vehicle (unless someone puts teeth in the concept of "man-rating" a vehicle). Fortunately, once the Atlas series or some other rocket grows large enough to handle Orion, NASA will be forced by law to use commercial services instead of pushing their own pet project, Ares 1. It's very possible that this will happen by 2014 when the Ares 1 will supposedly be in service. Maybe even by 2010 when the Shuttle is supposed to be phased out.
The Ares V is a much larger rocket (it has a payload of up to 150 tons). So it's possible that no commercial replacement will exist by the time of its deployment.http://www.pantheon.org/articles/p/pelias.html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think I'm going to start taking bets now:
In 30 years (or whatever) when somebody builds a ship capable of getting somewhere useful really really fast, it will be called Enterprise.
My basis for this theory is that geeks work at NASA, and geeks watch Star Trek.
It'll happen, mark my words!
Anything is possible, except skiing through revolving doors.
It was the very first scifi show I watched in my life, they aired it here in the late 60s / early 70s when I was probably no more than 6 years old, but I remembered much of it, the ship crew and its soundtrack. It was shocking to me over 30 years later to be able to find it on the net when all tv stations forgot it since long time. One day maybe we will thank the so called "pirates" if we will enjoy again other shows. This applies also to different works like books.
Funny, we already discussed the name a month ago. Actually, the funny part is that for once, it wasn't the Slashdot editors that made it a dupe, it was NASA...sort of.
Apparently some clever folk at collectspace.com with too much spare time started digging around and came up with some internal correspondence or something to that effect stating that the project would be called Orion. Then they kept on digging and found that NASA had registered the name as a trademark when used in aerospace. Remarkably, they even found project logos for Orion, Constellation, and Ares. I saw the story on several space news sites, so I was a little taken aback when CNN was reporting that the name had just been released today.
Also, you're confusing two extremely similar names. Aries is one of the famous constellations of the zodiac, and was also a derivative of the Minuteman missile. Ares is the name of the new rocket series and is the god of war in Greek mythology, their counterpart to the Roman Mars. I think it's a somewhat unfitting name since the vehicle is to be used for low Earth orbit and travel to the moon...not to Mars.
Enterprise. It really wasn't that useful, it had no engines, and was "launched" in the air on the back of a 747 to glide to a landing, to test the Shuttle's performance in the air and in landing.
i ters/enterprise.html
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/resources/orb
Tag lost or not installed.
I for one, welcome our new Master of Orion.
This would be the project work done at General Atomics in the 50's. The nuclear "ban" in '62 killed it, if you recall. My response to the name: how dare they? The CEV should be named ValueJet.