SLS and Orion Make Progress – But …
NASA Mission: Orion’s Next Step, NPR Morning Edition
“The space agency hopes the Orion capsule, which has been transported to the Kennedy Space Center, will one day take astronauts to the moon and Mars. The program, however, faces budget challenges.”
Keith’s note: My little bit of snark is included toward the end of this story.
Snark is deserved in this case.
It is February 4th 2016 and Orion/SLS is still happening.
If by still happening you mean sucking billions from NASA’s budget and falling further (years) behind schedule on their efforts to build a capsule and launch vehicle that nobody wanted except the porkers in Congress, then I guess that’s sort of accurate. Orion is designed to ferry astronauts to the Moon, not Mars, so we can only hope that by Feb 4th, 2017, it will be either 1)eliminated from the budget (cancelled) or 2) our journey to Mars will be changed to the Moon ASAP.
In slow motion.
Got a new weld in place? Yea! We met our Milestone!!
Yay! And the preliminary fasteners for the fasteners test on the initial mock-up are coming next month too!
If you recall, in the first years after it was announced as Apollo on steroids, the Safe Simple Soon Orion was going to fly for the first time in 2009, before shuttle ended in 2010, and it would carry people by 2011. The goal back then was first to take a full ISS crew of 7 to and from ISS.
It did not fly in 2009 and did not fly with crew in 2011, and is too expensive to go to ISS and crew size has long since been reduced to no more than 4. At the Augustine panel hearings in 2009, Geyer and Hanley announced proudly they would fly by 2014. Sally Ride said maybe 2017, but 2019 was more likely. I don’t know where Geyer or Hanley are any longer. Sally, we sadly lost several years ago but so far her schedule for a crewed Orion probably will be missed by several years.
If we wait for a profit motive to get us back to the Moon and to Mars we will all be dead and gone before that happens. This is all a big dust up about who gets to spend the governments money for exploration: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing or ATK…. no one is going to get rich going to Mars….not for a long, long time. As a matter of fact no one is getting rich in aviation. Aviation’s graveyard is littered with the bones of people who were going to make a killing in the business. THE FIRST COMERICAL COMPANIES THAT FUNDED COLONY’S IN THE NEW WORLD ALL WENT BROKE! And that was in an environment where you could breath the air, drink the water, and eat the game. For commercial adventures in our solar system…watch the Expanse on the Sci Fi channel, that’s all the closer we’ll get for a while. The government or governments are going to fund this for the next 100 years, if its going to get done at all. God reality SUCKS.
Not quite. Some of the first companies to fund American exploration and colonies are still around. The Gentlemen Adventurers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, established around 1670, if memory serves, has been in business ever since. There have been some reorganizations and changes, but it remains a profitable business.
There is an area between pure market profit drive and government funded owned, this is where new space is working. A government acting more like a customer and less like a developer, enables market competition; a battle between ideas, cost, performance. Which would you choose? 20 billion for a rocket you own and use once a year or 2 billion for a partnership rocket you get to use six times a year?
Umm… it’s not snark if it’s true? And your last blurb was pretty much on the mark.
Well, the Snark was really a Boojum.
I still crack up when Charlie Bolden says we’re going to Mars in the 2030’s. Easy to say now and easy to dodge when it never happens.
Echo chamber.