NASA is finally taking a sensible approach to Congress’s unrealistic goals:
“What we’re trying to do is maximize commercial applications of these technologies while getting an impact for our requirements as well,” says Jason Crusan, director of advanced exploration systems in the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) directorate at NASA headquarters. “There may be commercial applications for habitation in low Earth orbit at some point. We’d like to understand what industry thinks about that. At the same time we have real requirements for habitation in deep space, and there have been some commonalities in that.”
NASA (for now) has to waste billions on SLS/Orion, because it’s the law. They’ll continue to do so in the hope that it will satisfy the fools on the Hill, while doing sensible procurements for hardware they actually need to get beyond earth orbit.
This is probably wishful thinking, but I’d like to think that NASA is sneaking back into the technology development path it proposed back in 2009-2010 before the porkers revived Ares-5/SLS.
I thought the development path was the right idea, while not being much confident that it would be executed well. But better that than a well-executed SLS that has nothing to do.
If Bigelow’s business plan works, part of NASA becomes just another customer.