Concentration (TM) NASA editionOh isn’t it crazy to watch a design progress sometimes? I can’t think of a better example than NASA’s spanky new Orion lunar/mars(lol) orbiter. In what could be called a classic American mindset, the idea went something like, “I want to go back to the moon, hear its nice there this time of year. How to get there.... I know! I’ll take a 50 year old, ridiculously huge rocket and upsize it 200% (like my favorite happy meal)....” In other words, from 3 crew to 6.
Upon initially hearing about this plan I was seriously stoked, never since NASA had burned up not one but two martian satellites from english/metric conversions was there greater possibilities for hilarium than with this endeavor (for the record I think having people on other balls of rock is a good idea, makes it a little harder to kill ourselves off or have yellowstone do the job for us).
Once the design was settled for the above American style plan (rather than some rather intriguing other private corporation possibilities proposed), NASA pundants tried defending the design direction like in this article here. From the article you can see where the similarities will only be “skin deep” but after reading the whole thing we see that primarily these design “enhancements” will be with the systems and the ship size. Translation, “instead of a Ti being the brain we will chuck a Dell in the thing and we will make it 6 ft bigger”.
In a move that must terrify future astronauts, the first thing NASA did was begin tearing apollo capsules in museums to see what made them tick (I have searched everywhere for this article, I am sorry I can’t find it atm). I am sure the idea went something like “How are we gonna jack this design if it isn’t on AutoCAD =(. I don’t want to work.... I know, grab the calipers....” Now assuming they can handle the math (scaling the whole thing up) we can only pray that the astronauts will be safe enough.
But last in this series of what I would could unfortunate (if not disgraceful) events, it turns out the upsizing just isn’t working..... (see here). I guess multiplying a number by 2 was to much for their Ti’s to handle so now we are going from a 6 crew module to a 4 crew module. So now we have a ship, barely larger than the last, built off scavenged 50 year old parts and this is the best the leading nation in the world can do? Perhaps it was concerns over dehydrating astronauts or the embarrassing fact that at present design speed, we will be hitching rides on Russian ships for 5 years after the shuttles are set aside to decay in peace.
Sigh... I don’t write this to be funny anymore. The more I think on it, it really is sad, simply sad. I guess at this point we can only hope that American capitalism with private ships like Spaceship one and the Falcon can take over as yet another bloated governmental enterprise falls on its face (I am sure that makes us look cool on the international scene).
