A Look At NASA's Orion Project 108
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."
Re:So depressing. (Score:0, Interesting)
space has been up (or down, or over) there for... ever. and to be honest, going up there isn't something we HAD to do for any real reason.
don't get me wrong, space exploration has given us all kinds of things, technologies, sciences, pushing the boudries... communications, materials... blah blah blah, yeah, it's totally aweome! i get it. I'm all for pushing NASA all the way...
but to be honest, you NEED a military. You LIKE a NASA. Wars happen, and they aren't all created by some bullshit shadow uberfamilies of elite blah blah bullshit. When you need a military, it's sort of like a parachute... nothing else will do. When you need a military, you can't really WAIT for it to be created ex nihilo. The other guy doesn't wait.
Space, on the other hand... has always been up (etc) there, and you can go explore it on your own timeline.
You wanna pare down the military? Start with all the shit in the military that has nothing to do with warfighting. You'll find some pretty good money that can be used for space there.
Re:So depressing. (Score:2, Interesting)
Orion is NOT carrying astronauts to Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
There is absolutely zero possibility that astronauts are going to be travelling to Mars in Orion which is basically Apollo + 1 extra seat. NASA has been misleading the general public about this for years. Oh yeah, astronauts are going to stay strapped to their seats for 18 months...in a capsule with almost no room to move. Major components of the project - including room to live and move around, along with mild gravity provided by a centrifuge - haven't been even designed yet, let alone price spec'd. No one has any idea how they will work or how they will protect astronauts from radiation from the Sun. I'm betting it's 2100 before we ever get to Mars, at least under NASA.
The one good feature of ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
NASA's vaunted "Asteroid Redirect Mission" is now widely regarded as crap. It doesn't give us any new knowledge, it's not a good intermediate step for human colonization of space, and it's been mismanaged so badly that you could tell me it had been infiltrated by Russians intent on destroying America, and I wouldn't much doubt it.
But it does have one saving grace: it's our best shot if we ever find an asteroid headed for Earth impact.
I found this out sort of by accident - I was playing Kerbal Space Program, which has a NASA-sponsored module for doing asteroid redirects. I had a ship designed for that in orbit, and was looking for a good target.
I found one. On a direct intercept course. About a week out.
To make things worse, it was at like 80 degrees inclination. To cut a very long story short, I managed to redirect it to aerobrake, then stabilized the orbit so it wouldn't eventually deorbit.
Now, I fully realize that was a game, and that rocket science is actually a lot more complex than strapping a shitload of boosters to everything (my standard design). But the basic principle remains - something that can redirect an asteroid to enter lunar orbit is also something that can redirect an asteroid off of an impact course.
I don't know if that fully justifies the program - it's an absurd expense for what we get. On the other hand, what price can we put on avoiding extinction?
Re:That's not an Orion... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:NASA has become small indeed... (Score:5, Interesting)
I will join you in the eye roll, but directed to your post.
I assumed anyone reading my OP would understand I was talking about a specific engineering and exploration *project* rolled up from scratch (which is a colloquial term, with the literary license customary for such usage). Take the logic of your post far enough, and I would have to credit Australopithecus for the discovery of fire.
We all, to paraphrase Newton, stand on the shoulders of giants. So too did the engineers at NASA. This should not require further explanation.
Meanwhile, judging by the serial explosive failures of the 50s rocket tech you mentioned, and the weak tea served up by Mercury vs. the superior Russian tech, Apollo did not have the kind of technological base you've implied, anyway.
If you read a good history of the Apollo effort, you'll find that the engineers *desperately* wanted a clean sheet approach. And they got it. Along with a government that cut red tape and cleared the way for them to do what they were there to do.
Those days are gone.
Re:NASA has become small indeed... (Score:4, Interesting)
When Kennedy gave that speech, we had all of 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience from putting a single manned capsule on what was essentially a V-2 rocket imported from Germany. Alan Shepard could have held his breath through most of that flight.
So yeah, the later Mercury flights, the Gemini flights, and the Apollo program were essentially from scratch.