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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."
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.
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.
..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...
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.
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/p/pelias.html
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Tons of money was an understatement. It was the #2 or #3 item on the Federal budget at the time, consuming as much as about 10% of the GDP of the USA. It is impossible to fathom exactly how pervasive NASA contracts were in the 1960s, but it seemed as though just about every major high tech company in America was involved in some way or another with the building of the Apollo spacecraft and other related components.
/. readers would either be a NASA employee or a NASA sub-contractor. I'm not kidding here either. Comparisons between the Apollo program and the Manhattan project, or even the Pyrimids of Giza certainly are very well founded as these were undertakings of monumental proportions that could only be done by major world powers.
If this were to be done today, it would be like one in five
I don't know what it would take to get a major effort of similar proportions in order to send people to Mars, but somehow I think it is going to be a company traded on NASDAQ instead of a U.S. government agency that will get there first. I don't know if that is good or bad, but it will definitely be a very different history of the world if it happens. More of a D. Delos Harriman future instead of the legacy of JFK.
RAH, eat your heart out where you may rest in peace. Your vision of the future is coming true.
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.