
Decades old invocation: "Don't hassle me, beast!"
4 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2015
This is definitely not good enough. This has all been done before, several times. It should not be taking so long and should not be failing. Orion isn't the program that should be done, but NASA decided to do Orion. They've had enough time. It should be flying right now with people in it.
I'm not going to say it's just because NASA is a bloated American federal institution, because I'm not sure how bad the bloat is. And I've seen many a case of bloated and stupid private business, but in private business it's usually a lot easier to sweep things under a carpet no one will look under.
But NASA staff aren't making the right decisions and aren't running their programs as well as they should. 2023 is 8 years from now. 8 years took the Apollo Program from start (1960) to actual crewed flight of the spacecraft in Apollo 7 (1968). And that was with a lot less knowledge and experience, and including screwups that led to the Apollo 1 fire and other problems.
NASA may not have the equivalent budget that they had then, but they have a good enough budget that they should be doing better. Robert Zurbin of Mars Direct fame has said they could do Mar Direct or a similar variant with the current budget. And that doesn't mean gutting everything else NASA does, like the robotic probe programs and aerospace research.
I still think NASA has a basic problem with seeing the better ways of doing something. Orion is just a bigger Apollo. Decades of flight experience has shown the best spacecraft of the 1960's was Sergei Korolev's Soyuz. For a spacecraft with only 20% more mass than the Apollo Command Module it had over 40% more internal space. It was much better than Apollo for Earth orbital work and give it a mission thrust stage and a lander and it could have done the Moon missions as well.
And if NASA wants to go to Mars, do a decent job of engineering and design. I think Mars Direct or a variant, like Mars Semi-Direct, is the way to go. That needs a Saturn V equivalent launch vehicle. So get cracking on that! Fight out the designs of the payload spacecraft and get a direction.
Don't frak around just fiddling with Orion which if they were organized should be flying with people in it right now!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct#Revisions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_%28spacecraft%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Command/Service_Module
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_programme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program