Six years after its maiden (and only) flight, Eric Berger has some thoughts.
[Update a few minutes later]
From a comment over there:
Probably the most salient points:
A mockup lacking many critical systems flew into space once, six years ago.
The next test flight is basically another mockup, lacking even life support systems.
The first full-up complete vehicle launch is supposed to be with crew trusting their lives to a vehicle which has never been flight tested with systems complete, and also a similarly never-flown service module. Because for all the expense and mass, Orion doesn’t have much duration without a service module.
NASA safety culture at work. Mountains of paperwork instead of actual testing on actual hardware.
Just getting this far on Orion has been 15 years and $24B.
Ridiculous pork capsule to match a ridiculous pork rocket in the SLS.
Yup. It’s a Potemkin space program.
I agree with the update. Calling it a maiden flight is a bit of a stretch. It was more like a very high altitude drop test.
“An inefficient process”
This came across as, “An infinite process,” at first glance.
“The SLS rocket probably will not be ready before early 2022, if not later. Congressional insistence on using the SLS ”
Good or bad? Does this mean getting rid of one means getting rid of both? I’m not sure there is any value to Orion flying on other launchers.
Slightly OT, stumbled across this YouTube channel, The Angry Astronaut. Been around about a year. Kind of interesting. https://www.youtube.com/c/TheAngryAstronaut/videos
Why is SpaceX going to get to the moon before NASA? Because everyone at NASA from Bridenstine all the way down to the janitors are terrified of failure, and Elon Musk isn’t.
The decision to fly crew around the moon on the first actual operational Orion has long been something I’ve ranted about. An untried life support system is not something you want to deal with on a lunar trip. In LEO, it’s different; you can deorbit pretty quick. On the way to the moon? No. And even an Apollo-style direct abort wouldn’t be fast enough, and Orion’s weak service module doesn’t have the Delta/V to do it anyway.
The excuse was that the life support system would not be ready for the first (unmanned) SLS launch. However, SLS slips have long since removed that excuse.
As for an SLS launch date, IMHO they’ll be lucky to do the green run before Nov. 2021, let alone launch. IMHO, the only shot SLS has at flying in 2021 is if it RUDs during the green run; if so, some parts of it will surely take flight.
Biden says he’ll redirect NASA toward climate change and abandon the silly moon plans. I don’t see how Orion and SLS survive that.
They survived Obama.
And I don’t think Biden has ever said anything important.
Not sure Biden won the election. And not sure how long he got to live. And doubt Kamala knows what NASA is.
And we could get Pelosi as president.
Joe, Kamala or Pelosi are all pretty clueless and older two have
good excuses. All seem to be on drugs.
And Trump doesn’t seem very interested in whole topic.
And isn’t it the Senate’s babies?
Joe says a lot of things, some of them even coherent. Congress holds the purse strings, and Shelby’s Lunch System puts too much money in too many districts for anything short of the Second Coming to kill it.
If the SLS ever flies, I hope it has a rapid unscheduled disassembly on its way to orbit. With no crew on board, it won’t kill anybody, and the massive explosion will hopefully terminate the program in a most spectacular fashion.
If Orion gets to the moon it will be on top of a Falcon Heavy.
Or in the cargo hold of a Starship.
That would be awesome. It would also be the ultimate humiliation for Orion to be treated as an expensive piece of cargo.
Falcon Heavy is too small to launch Orion through TLI, as is New Glenn (when and if). A distant possibility: SpaceX SuperHeavy with an expendable Starkicker second stage could put both Orion and the Natonal Team HLS through TLI, with the lander braking the stack into LLO, leaving the Orion service module with just enough delta-vee to get home. Rather than steroids, call it Apollo on Red Bull…
Orion is very symptomatic of something I think is general and deadly among the large established engineering firms in this country. It isn’t just that it’s slow and political – the design is *incoherent*. The decisions don’t make sense.
Our organizations have lost the ability to design and build things. (Or should that be build, and design things? I couldn’t find a machine or workshop in $location$ to save my life, and wouldn’t have been permitted inside had they not driven them all offsite) The sheer futility of trying to get any concrete knowledge, or to get anything done within these organizations is nearly impossible to describe.
Well, I’ll edit a common observation to say “Organizations that can’t build anything, won’t.” Alan Turing once remarked that the American’s beat Britain in building a computer because the American’s wanted a computer, whereas Britain wanted a well run government program that aimed at building a computer. Both succeeded, but the latter of course doesn’t result in a working computer, just lots of government jobs.
Competition makes the absence of something pretty obvious. When no heavy-lift vehicles are putting long-duration space capsules up, no one notices that Orion isn’t there, either. But once SpaceX has vehicles performing that mission, and performing it frequently, SLS/Orion’s lack of achievement will become glaringly apparent to everyone.
They only make no sense if you assume that the system is being designed to actually return people to the moon on any kind of useful schedule. They make perfect sense once you understand the program’s purpose is to provide endless employment for favored contractors.
I regard it as some well-funded program that is “Building a path to the future!” similar to most non-space programs in the Soviet Union. It’s nothing but motivational slogans covering over a profound lack of progress, success, or performance by any normal metric.
Even if it “succeeds”, the number of astronauts who will ride it through 2025 would fit in a Tesla.
You know, it *was* the propaganda posters that were the final straw. I started looking elsewhere and joined a different project soon afterwards.
But by political metrics, SLS and Orion are outstanding successes even if they never fly.
They make perfect sense once you understand the program’s purpose is to provide endless employment for favored contractors.
We’ve definitely confirmed by now that the demonstrated payload capacity to Low Huntsville Orbit is at least 1 billion metric tons of federal tax dollars. And always reliably on time!