NASA Shows Off Mock-Up of Mars-Capable Spacecraft

N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer." They're still working on the parachute.

Comments

Yeah well.

[MrKaos]

I know you'll probably mod me a troll but I have a sinking felling that me and actually many of the people reading slashdot will never see a real push into space by humanity. I really want to remain optimistic about it but for me this whole orion project is like a reminder of where we *could* have been at the completion of the Apollo launchers.

Don't get me wrong I hope we get off this rock and have a *real* space program but I suspect that I am not the only person reading this that thinks they were born before their time.

Good luck NASA, I hope it all goes well, this time.

A little reading, please

[stuntpope]

Is it too much to ask for people who read a supposedly tech site actually read, and perhaps think, before pounding their keyboards with things like "how's that little thing going to get 6 astronauts to Mars?", "NASA is stoopid", and the like?

Its proposed use is to carry up to 6 astronauts to the space station, and from there, 4 to the Moon. For the Moon missions, Orion will travel along with the Altair lunar lander.

For Mars missions, "Orion could rendezvous in low Earth orbit with vehicles that will take explorers to other destinations in our solar system such as Mars." http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/306407main_orion_crew%20_expl_vehicle.pdf

These Mars-bound vehicles will be assembled in low Earth orbit. There is no reason to believe that 4 or 6 astronauts would be confined to the small Orion capsule for the duration of a Mars voyage.

On a side note, I was 5 years old when I watched the first manned landing on the Moon. It's amazing to me that a manned Mars mission may happen when I'm in my 70's. Certainly not how I imagined things when I was young.

Re:I'm confused

[moogsynth]

Um, reasonable in what way? It certainly wasn't useful for putting cargo in orbit. The most efficient and practical way (currently) to put anything into space is an engine strapped to gigantic gas tank strapped to a little bit of cargo. Adding additional stuff like wings, landing gears, rudder (and a frame to support it all) only detracts from the amount of cargo you can launch and seems to have negligible reuse benefits as demonstrated by the space shuttle.

For the X-15 series, you might just be right. But the proposed X-20 was the plane that eventually got the chop. This one had a rocket too, which essentially made it a prototype space shuttle. Reusable. What's more, the Titan rockets they wanted for it had 2.5 million pounds of thrust (11,100,000 force newtons) compared with the Mercury-Atlas' 367,000 (1,600,000). What made them cut the project was that the Atlas rockets were already available whereas the more powerful Titan rockets were still four years away.