6 thoughts on “Orion Anniversary”

1. Where does the time go?
   Same place as the money?

2. Mandella effect? Did it really fly? Kidding aside, they just need to put NASA out of the manned launch business.

3. I’d like to see NASA put into the research business. Disregard whether the tech being researched is for manned or unmanned flights. Just do the research to test ideas and techniques and provide them to the industry.

   1. Just like the old NACA.

   2. Back in the 1990s, my company (Kelly Space & Technology, Inc.) had a NASA contract for coming up with future space architectures. In the contract, they listed a whole slew of technology items they thought were critical to develop, and one of our tasks was to estimate what it would take to bring them to a high TRL. One of my guys had a brilliant idea, which was to do a round robin of all of the NASA centers, and find what each had done on those technologies. The result was that all of the technologies had been brought to a high TRL (it varied), and the reports put on the shelf and forgotten. Which is, I am certain, what happened to our report on the subject.

      There is an old, old saying about the German technological/industrial giant Siemens (which continually re-innovates): “If Siemens only knew what Siemens knows.” I really wish I had put that as the subtitle to our final NASA report.,

4. One other aspect of that flight was how it brought into sharp focus the futility of writing regulations for commercial space activities before said activities are even developed. I was at AST during this flight, which was licensed as both a commercial launch and reentry. We tied ourselves in knots trying to figure out who the license holder(s) would be, because the flight profile didn’t align with the FAA’s definitions of launch and reentry. I don’t even remember the outcome, only that it was a legal kludge, and it required an enormous amount of effort on our part.

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