[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=30901803#p30901803:1kmnd20d said:
normally butters[/url]":1kmnd20d]Orion will only have a 21-day life support endurance. It's only taking us beyond the moon if it comes along for the ride with a true interplanetary spacecraft (design and funding TBD), and in that situation it's just a particularly heavy little bit of habitable volume we're lugging along.
Exactly this.
The task of getting around in space is fundamentally different to the job of getting up there at the start and back down at the end. The only reason Apollo was built the way it was, as a single-stack brute-force-and-back design, was because Kennedy's '69 deadline and the race against the Russians left nowhere near enough time to develop and deploy a more componentized design that could launch deep space missions directly from orbit. Since then, a huge amount of experience and expertise has been developed in living and assembling complex craft in LEO, but of course now all that gets forgotten and wasted, just as all the expertise in building big rockets and deep space capsules was tossed out before.
If NASA^h^h^h^h Congress honestly was serious about creating a sustainable, cost-effective deep space program they'd have funded long-term development of separate vehicles for each role, and laid out
specific missions for each. For all the bluster and bravado, heatshield and parachutes are hardly high on the list of essentials one should be lugging to the moon and back; conversely, launch vehicles have better things to do than toss up long-term habitat systems only for the damn things to come back down a few weeks later.
The whole thing stinks of F-35 by way of Darien Scheme, like fatty pork chops left out for a week. Your tax dollars at work.
