Category Archives: Business

Orion

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.

Computer Update

Welp, I gave up on rescuing that installation, and built a new one with the latest version on a spare 250G SSD. It only took me a couple hours to reinstall most of the software I need, including my virtual Windows machine, which is a lot less time than I wasted trying to get the other one to boot. I also built a shell script to make it easier next time (and we know there will be a next time).