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."

Comments

Stargate?

[nonother]

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.

Re:Stargate?

[d_strand]

you kids these days :-)

Besides a constelation, Orion is also a well known space project from the 70s which dealt with nuclear propulsion (wiki).

Re:Stargate?

[CarnivoreMan]

But then, there have been 8 ships in the USA Navy with the name Enterprise as well as 14 Enterprise ships for Britian's Royal Navy. Its certainly not exclusive to the Trek 'oh Stars Orion though... well thats just a blatant attempt to snag fans from the Stargates... or perhaps fans of Greek mythological hunters.

Re:Stargate?

[91degrees]

However, I have a feeling it's going to be less reliable than Ancient technology.

Well, lets be honest, ancient technology was built to last. Anything that broke easily isn't around anymore.

Re:Stargate?

[b1t r0t]

you not-quite-kids these days :-)

Besides a constellation, and a well known space project from the 70s, Orion is also where those babe-a-licious green slave girls come from.

NASA Loves Stargate

[colonslashslash]

This is proof! A tribute to the recently cancelled SG-1 (although the Orion was part of the Atlantis spin off)

http://gateworld.net/omnipedia/ships/links/orion.s html

Oh look, some straws... I must clutch at them wildly.

Re:NASA Loves Stargate

[AKAImBatman]

This is proof! A tribute to the recently cancelled SG-1 (although the Orion was part of the Atlantis spin off)

Atlantis is assigned the Dadaelus. The Prometheus was Earth's primary defense. The Orion took her place after the Prometheus's destruction.

The wrong name

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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.

Re:The wrong name

[ILikeRed]

And maybe they are fans of what Larry Niven did with the idea.

Also, don't forget the Master of Orion video game - which has a fitting theme.

Oh, to be able to live on Mars....

Re:The wrong name

[The_REAL_DZA]

Perhaps, but to date only Slim Pickens has actually ridden a nuclear bomb anywhere (and he rode his straight down...) so there's not likely to be the kind of cutthroat controversy usually reserved for the Astronomers -vs- Geologists.

Re:The wrong name

[budgenator]

So lets get this straight, we name the booster after the God of War, we name the crew vehicle after the Hunter, that also shared its name with a "OMG it's Nuclear(tm)" project, and NASA is going to convince all of the SUV driving Soccer Moms the the project's real purpose isn't to recon baby harp seals for slaughter from outer space; yeah right.

Re:The wrong name

[Anonymous Coward]

Where were you when NASA named the space station "ISS", an acronym already used for "Internet Security Systems"?

Shouldn't it be called Onan

[bofkentucky]

We're being jerked around with "we can put a crew in orbit" instead of working on high speed probe drives and planetary exploration.

Cue Soundtrack

[KlomDark]

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?

Timeframe

[wampus]

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?

Re:Timeframe

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently reading Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an Option." Yes, Mercury flights started in 1961 and we hit the moon with Apollo in 1969.

The difference is that with the first time around, the government threw TONS of money at it and gave it their full support. I have a feeling that if the Chinese or the North Koreans came out tomorrow and said that they were putting a man on the moon in 5 years, we would see some changes. As it is, with NASA's current budget, I think a man in orbit in 8 years is doable...With what we learned from Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, once we prove to ourselves that the hardware is capable, it should be pretty easy to get back to the moon.

Re:Timeframe

[DerekLyons]

This new craft is supposed to be based upon the proven Apollo system, which is completely paid for.

It's 'based on' the Apollo system in the same sense that a 2006 Corvette is 'based on' a 1966 Corvette or the latest CPU from Intel is 'based on' the 8086.
 
 

Why is it taking longer to develop a craft which is basically an improvement on what we had 40 years ago?

Mostly because their is little resemblence between the two models except at the most superficial levels. They are using Apollo specs and modern equipment - equipment that doesn't exist except as spec sheets. (Not to mention we can no more quickly conjure up a modern Apollo than we can a modern '66 Corvette from scratch. Many components are no longer manufactured, manufacturing methods have changed, etc... etc...) Car manufacturers typically take 4-8 years to bring a new model to market, and they do this *every year*. Ditto for a new airliner, and airframe manufacturers have decades of experience and ongoing processes. (Which NASA and its contractors significantly don't.)
 
 

Using modern design and manufacturing techniques, plus modern materials combined with the fact that the research is already done, is it unreasonable to expect a quicker turnaround?

Yes, it's very unreasonable - because you have a vast misunderstanding of what is involved. (No offense, but few people who haven't studied the programs appreciate the magnitude of the task.) 'Modern design techniques' aren't magic wands, nor are 'modern manufacturing techniques' - you still have to do all the development, analysis, design, integration, testing, qualification, etc..., etc... Modern stuff is a bit faster at doing the calculations and writing up and distributing the paperwork/research/specs/etc..., but the actual work and skull sweat still takes considerable time.
 
Take for example the CAD/CAM software they'll need to design and integrate the capsule - software at this level is extremely specialized. You can't simply take the program that Boeing uses for airliners, or GM for cars, or Electric Boat for submarines and start designing a capsule. These are three different programs, each optimized for their particular use. You can't simply buy Microsoft Industrial Design XP 2006, install it and go to work. It will have to be created practically from scratch. (You can't go back to the old ways either - without starting from scratch.)
 
Or to take something very basic to the new spacecraft - the structure of the crew compartment. Attached somewhere to this will be the flight control computer - which will weigh a quarter of the Apollo era computer and take up about a third of its volume. This means you have to redesign the structure to mount the computer - which changes loads, vibration modes, etc... etc... (Even just sliding an adapter into place, a bad idea for various reasons, will start the same cascade.) Cabling will be different, which means new holes for the clamps, (which also changes loads and modes). Both the changes to the computer and the changes caused by the computer will change the center of gravity, which effects aerodynamic performance, loads on the escape system and parachutes, etc... etc... And that's just *one* change among thousands - each of which interacts with the others.

Re:Timeframe

[Teancum]

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.

If this were to be done today, it would be like one in five /. 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.

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.

Looking forward to seeing the crew of Orion

[krell]

....all of them buxom green women in bikinis.

Apollo Legacy

[McFortner]

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

Apollo timeframe

[krell]

"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.

RUN run run run run.

[the_REAL_sam]

RUN run Run run Run.
Pant Pant Pant Pant Pant.
SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT.

(Bursts through door)

"It's called Orion!"
"We Know."

The original Orion spaceship

[hpa]

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...

reinventing the wheel, and more...

[poopie]

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.

Re:That's not a spaceship

[WhiplashII]

Oh wait, theres no wings, no rudder, and the only airfoil is a blunt cone...

And it's a good thing, too. Wings are a really dumb idea for a spaceship - they are heavy during liftoff, hard to cool during reentry, and not big enough when you land. And these "blunt cone" airfoils can have over 100 miles of cross-range, and make pinpoint landings. (Think about it, they have about a 0.3 lift to drag ratio and fall through about 100 miles of atmosphere, trying to burn off the insane speed they have) All of the previous capsules landed within one mile of the target using 1960s technology! (Exception equipment failure, of course)

Really, it is hard to beat a capsule - and pointless to try at this point. You put wings on for convenience, when you don't care that you are throwing away design margins. We are not there in space vehicle...

pelias comes kinda close

[way2trivial]

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/p/pelias.html

The old Project Orion

[Vexar]

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.