“It was said in a new conference 2or more years ago – so its old news.”

Well, considering your record on remembering things, you’ll have to cite an actual link before I’ll believe you on this.

I’m still thinking you took something out of context, because it’s obvious that NASA already operates a reusable spacecraft, Orion was originally planned to be reusable, and other companies have designs for reusable vehicles. It’s clearly not technologically difficult. Hence my disbelief in your statement.

They had this requirement that CEV would land on land. It could not of course use retrorocket, a la Soyuz. So they came up with airbags, then a blend of airbags and rockets, LMT also had retrorockets in the parachute in their proposal… Then there was the issue of dumping the heatshield. Then they went from a PICA tile TPS to an AVCOAT TPS (Apollo). All in all land landing was a poor (outside of contingency) requirement for Orion. Especially in view of the (lack of) performance of Ares I. Cart before the horse and all those kind of things…

>> Kelly Starks wrote @ August 4th, 2010 at 3:58 pm

>>NASA also now claims reusable space craft are beyond current technology”

>== This is either the biggest story of the day, or you’re
> misinterpreting what someone said.

It was said in a new conference 2or more years ago – so its old news.

Given it was right after a shuttle landing it was pretty galling.

> Mr. Starks I thought the Orion design was reusable? Did something change?

Yeah, that was striped out year before last. Some say it was to save weight, others because they thought all expendable designs ment they didn’t need to worry how bad it would be after being shaken like crazy on Ares-I.

What is sad, really sad is that the CEV started under O’Keefe as a competitive bid. Their approach was making sense. Frustrating because it was slow, yet more reasonable. Too bad that Columbia took O’Keefe away as well. He was no scientist, no engineer but had good common sense.

I think Congress knows very well. They are not stupid. Just selfish.

“ESAS was wrong because it was a dictate.”

Yes, top down design is hardly ever right, especially if you don’t have tons of data to use for the evaluation. Competitive bids, when structured properly, are usually better since they bring out the creativeness in people/companies.

Congress doesn’t realize this, and they really are just looking out for their bottom line (i.e. how much does my district/state get), so we’re pretty lucky at least one of the Congressional plans is worth not puking over… :-Q

They happened to be wrong because it takes a little more than 90 days (was it 60? I cannot remember) to define an architecture. ESAS was wrong because it was a dictate. With all the available horsepower at NASA they did not even run ascent/abort analyses on their preferred LV. How bad is that?

“But clearly, Mike Griffin’s NASA didn’t believe in them, or they wouldn’t have wasted billions on Ares.”

Design by belief… Oh well…

“NASA” doesn’t claim that, but when he was center director at MSFC, Art Stephenson declared that X-33 “proved” that we weren’t ready to build reusables. Yes, it was a dumb and illogical statement. But clearly, Mike Griffin’s NASA didn’t believe in them, or they wouldn’t have wasted billions on Ares.