If this story is true, Orion is becoming even more Apollo-like:

Previously, the Orion was designed to land on large airbags at a landing range, although earlier hints that was no longer going to be the case came via documentation that showed a water landing – off the coast of Australia – for the Orion 3 unmanned test flight in September 2012. The first manned flight, Orion 4, was due to land at Edwards Air Force Base.

Also part of the mass saving design cycle – knocking off a total of 1,200 lbs from Orion – is the deletion of green propellants on the Crew Module, returning to the tried and tested hypergolic Reaction Control Systems (RCS). This weight savings measure was made in-line with the change to a water landing, due to salt water’s neutralizing of potential hypergolic fuel spills after splashdown.

This has many program implications. Water landing has an impact on the trade as to whether to expend or reuse the crew module. Previous trades assumed a land landing, and indicated that both life cycle and per-mission cost would be much lower for reuse, assuming a certain number of flights. But if they land in water, they may not have as much confidence in their ability to refurbish. If this means going to an expendable, they just increased the marginal flight costs quite a bit. And going to hypergolics continues to delay the day that we get propellants that are both clean, and (relatively) easy to manufacture off planet, such as methane and LOX. Of course, if they’re not going to refurbish, then at least they don’t have to worry about servicing a hypergolic system as part of turnaround, which has always been one of the ops-cost drivers for the Shuttle.

In addition, water landing means that they have to deal with a fixed-cost recovery fleet, for a low flight rate, because I don’t think they’re going to get free aircraft-carrier service, as they did in Apollo.

These are the same short-sighted types of decisions that killed the Shuttle program–pinching pennies up front with potential large increases in operational costs. And all because they chose to oversize the system, and wastespend their money building a new NASA-unique launcher that’s turning out to lack the performance they need.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I see that Chair Force Engineer and Clark Lindsey are also less than impressed.

[Update in the early afternoon]

Keith Cowing reports that PAO denies that a decision has been made. Make of that what you will…