{"id":9582,"date":"2011-05-30T09:56:51","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T13:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9582"},"modified":"2014-11-21T07:20:55","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T12:20:55","slug":"nasas-changing-goals-for-orion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/30\/nasas-changing-goals-for-orion\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA’s changing goals for Orion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ever-sarcastic Lewis Page<\/a> looks at how NASA has been trying to reposition their planned Orion spaceship:<\/p>\n

\n

NASA has declared that its pork-tastic Orion moonship — whose primary mission disappeared with President Obama’s decision that there will be no manned US return to the Moon — is now to be a “deep space transportation system”, suggesting that the agency plans to send it on missions beyond Earth orbit.<\/p>\n

It remains unclear how the newly-renamed Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) will travel into space, when it will do so and what its destination might be — though a near-Earth asteroid is a likely possibility. A major reason for Orion’s continued survival appears to be ignoble porkbarrel politics — but there is a tantalising possibility that it might fly beyond Earth orbit in the relatively near future.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What Page calls NASA’s “pork map<\/a>” shows why the MPCV has strong, bi-partisan political support regardless of its actual utility for the space program:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Regardless of the political support, however, the most likely view of US federal government finances indicates that Orion\/MPCV won’t be viable in the proposed timeframe. There’s a non-governmental choice, however:<\/p>\n

\n

Famous geekbiz-kingpin Elon Musk and his upstart rocket company SpaceX have come from nowhere in just eight years to successfully test-fly their brand new and very cheap Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, already apparently quite capable of performing the ISS supply mission. Only a few years ago, many in NASA and the established industry were arguing that this would never happen.<\/p>\n

It’s also no secret that Musk and SpaceX are working on a new Merlin 2 rocket engine, much bigger than the current Merlin 1 which propels the Falcon 9. A multicore heavy lifter based on Merlin 2 would be in the 100-tonne-plus realm required to mount a Mars mission, and will surely be the cheapest offering competing at the 2015 heavy lift Mars-rocket decision.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ever-sarcastic Lewis Page looks at how NASA has been trying to reposition their planned Orion spaceship: NASA has declared that its pork-tastic Orion moonship — whose primary mission disappeared with President Obama’s decision that there will be no manned US return to the Moon — is now to be a “deep space transportation system”, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,44,13],"tags":[158,1006,722,69,708],"class_list":["post-9582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-space-science","category-usa","tag-barackobama","tag-elonmusk","tag-lowearthorbit","tag-nasa","tag-spacex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2uy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9582"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9587,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9582\/revisions\/9587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}