Resonant Constellation

On Monday, NASA brought out a mockup of its new Orion spacecraft to the National Mall for public viewing. This vehicle is pretty damned cool: it’s supposed to bring people back to the moon and perhaps to mars. This, however, is supposed to occur in the 2020s and 2030s, in other words 10-20 years from now. Now, I understand the rationale behind NASA’s long lead times-there’s not much money to go around, so they need to develop and build stuff when the money is around. This leads to truly ridiculous situations (example: the Orbiter’s computers compared to, say, my laptop and the obsolete, though awesome equipment on the Cassini probe).

For once, the problem is not NASA’s, it goes back to the Federal Government (as most problems do these days). In the 60s and early 70s, this country managed to go from never having sent a person into space to landing two on the MOON in just eight years (1961-1969). They had to develop all of the technology, the physics, the methods, the equipment, all of this incredible stuff with the severely limited technology of the time all from scratch. Nobody had done it before. Now the exact same agency, using the same technology (even though we’ve had 40 years of incredible development), the same methods, doing the exact same task is going to take two years longer. This is comically ridiculous, bordering on absurd.

So, I’ve gotta say: if the government wants to set these lofty goals for the space program, they should actually put some funding behind their words. At that point, the problems would all become NASA’s, and based on that institution’s intriguing history, I’d bet we’d have even more fun and dangerous problems. But at least they’d be working on them.