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A Look At NASA's Orion Project
An anonymous reader writes "People in north Iowa got a first-hand look at NASA's Orion Project. Contractors with NASA were in Forest City to talk about the new project and show off a model of the new spaceship. NASA has big plans to send humans to an asteroid by 2025. The mission, however, will not be possible without several important components that include yet-to-be-developed technologies, as well as the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion spacecraft to fly astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit. In fact, Orion's first flight test later this year will provide NASA with vital data that will be used to design future missions."
You know this how? Science fiction?
It's currently being done in a way that makes in inseparable from the SLS rocket, an out-dated and over-budget project enabled by government inertia and congressional pork. Also, the Orion MPCV itself doesn't represent much of an upgrade over existing manned space capsules; if it's to go anywhere outside of Earth orbit it's going to need a much larger and more complex space habitat attachment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... which has yet to be developed.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
It took 8 years from Kennedy's speech in 1961 to a human on the moon in 1969. Not only did NASA get a moon rocket designed, tested, and launched in that time, it also got an intermediate rocket program (Gemini) designed, tested, and launched prior to the moon program.
From scratch.
Now we're looking at (maybe) 11 years to develop a working rocket to go to an asteroid. Oh boy, journey to an, umm, space rock. Really stirs the heart, doesn't it? And this after willingly withdrawing from manned spaceflight capacity altogether for at least six years, and counting. Yep, just folding the cards and walking away from the table.
Sure, go ahead and tell me how technically challenging the space rock odyssey will be. But the call of space comes from the same place the call of the sea arose from in the past. To Terra Incognita, where "Here Be Dragons." Sorry, there be no dragons around the space rock.
The technical wizardry missions could and should be handled by robots. Humans should be reserved for missions which stir the soul, or the people who pay for such things (you and me) will stop paying.
It's hard to think of a better demonstration of how the US used to get things done, and how it does things now, than to compare the space program we had 50 years ago to the current version.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood, and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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-1. What, exactly, would that achieve? Better to send some better robots to Mars that can actually dig some decent holes and look for life. Humans are obsolete technology for space exploration.
Mod parent +1 awesome.
I'm particularly amused that people seriously considered nuclear bomb pulse propulsion for EARTH TAKEOFF. And to think modern wimps complain about airport noise.....
NASA, other than a place for research money to go to die.
NASA still produces excellent research. PICA heat shield and the FasTrac experimental rocket which SpaceX developed into PICA-X and Merlin 1. HL-20, which became Dreamchaser. Transhab, became Bigelow. And so on.
It's on the operations side that they suck. Shuttle. ISS. Constellation/Area. SLS. Orion.
NASA would be an amazing place if you could divert the $3b from SLS/Orion and the $3b from ISS into aerospace research and competitive programs like COTS/Commercial Crew.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I'll preface this by saying I'm a libertarian and we tend to prefer the US government staying within its constitutional bounds. That means none of this post-WWII world police shit.
That said, most of these other countries where we have bases have "outsourced" their defense to us. When the US is mocked for the insanely high levels of spending on military vs these other countries, don't forget to adjust for the fact that countries allied with us have an artificially low defense budget. Take, for example, the UK. They couldn't even manage to mount an air campaign against Libya without US logistical support. That campaign was against an opponent who couldn't even fight back against their air strikes. There are plethora examples of this if you research it.
US government foreign policy prefers it this way, because then these other countries are beholden to us if they want to act militarily. It's hegemony.
I would prefer if we stopped subsidizing the world's defense, returned to operating within our constitutional framework (no standing army, motherfuckers!), and left the rest of the world to sort out their own problems. No one is going to fuck with us; I strongly support retaining our nuclear deterrent.