Jeff Foust has the story of Thursday’s scheduled flight.
If that’s the “biggest thing that NASA is doing this year,” it’s a sad testament to how little the agency is doing.
[Afternoon update]
Sorry, link was missing, fixed now.
7 thoughts on “EFT-1”
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The link is missing, but I’ll note that EFT-1 is supposed to splash down off the coast of Baja California. If NASA stuck three to seven illegal aliens on board, not only could we gather more useful information from the test, we could slightly up the number of deportations. Admittedly it would only be a small start, but if every agency made sure that their vehicles headed to Mexico returned some illegals, the numbers would start adding up.
What, you want to subject them to the hazardous conditions of the Van Allen belts? What is this, another Tuskeegee experiment?!! You racist you!
If they managed to survive the Arizona desert, they can survive an hour or two in the Van Allen belt. Besides, once they’re back in Mexico their health care is not our problem.
I stopped counting how many times they said “you can’t do this kind of test on the ground.” I also stopped counting how many “well, it’s like the final Orion, except for this major detail”, such as the primary engine, the lack of abort motor and weight, the lack of interior, the lack of thermal paint, the lack of…
Is this basically a “we got something with a 10% resemblance to Orion into orbit before 31-December-2014, please don’t de-fund us for missing deadlines” flight? Not that deadlines seem to carry any weight in most of these contracts any more, but still, I feel like I missed something about why this is even important.
Oh, wait, now I think I understand the “if this is the biggest thing NASA is doing all year” comment.
Sad, indeed.
The EM-1 flight comes next, which to me is about like trying to fly a manned Dragon on the first Falcon 9 test launch.
At least it will look cool. They better have cameras all over the dang thing.
Yeah it’s a real sputnik moment. All it took was a Delta4H…