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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."
... this is an Orion.
Get back to us when you can take a crew of 200 to Mars and back. In a month.
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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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.
that somebody apparently taught you.
Werner Von Braun's team of Germans were working for the US Army Ballistic Missile Development organaization in the 1950s where they used their WWII experience with the V2 in conjunction to the experience of their new American colleagues to develop the Redstone and Juno rockets. While Eisenhower was still president in 1958, they began the development of a giant experimental rocket called the "Juno V". The first stage comprised of a Juno rocket body (used as a fuel tank) with 8 redstone bodies clustered around it (half of them used to hold fuel, the others used as oxidizer tanks) with a cluster of Redstone H-1 engines at the bottom. This project was well underway as was construction of launch facilities in Florida (NOT complex 39 yet, rather LC34 and LC37 further south), plans for a liquid hyrdogen-fuelled upperstage, and studies on civilian uses of this rocket (including for possible moon missions) before John F Kennedy even started running for President and before Eisenhower joined with then-Senator Johnson to create NASA.
When NASA was created from NACA in response to Sputnik, the Von Braun team and their projects, including the Juno V, were transferred to NASA and this rocket was renamed to "Saturn I". John F Kennedy won the 1960 election and was sworn-in in January of 1961. He gave his moon speech to congress in May 1961 (and his famous space speech at Rice University in 1962). The first Saturn I flew from Cape Canaveral in October of 1961 (only 5 months after telling congress he wanted to go to the moon). My point is not to take anything away from Kennedy (he had the singular vision to challenge the nation to aim for the goal, and the managerial wisdom to put the right people in place to get the job done) but rather to say that it actually took more than 8 years to get to the moon... it was actually about 11 years from the time the first work started on the Saturn rockets to the time Neil Armstrong planted his boot.
Incidentally, it has now been a decade since the Columbia broke-up on reentry and the Bush Administration set in motion plans to replace the shuttle with Orion sitting atop an expendable rocket for missions to the Moon and Mars, so it's fair to be upset by the sluggish progress on this retro-future path back to the 1960s