nasa: hey, lay off ares!
Contrary to articles from the Orlando Sentinel about the all but imminent demise of the Ares rocket and speculation about how the next president could consider killing the project in favor of something simpler, NASA insists that the Sentinel’s articles are much ado about nothing. Apparently, the issues of drift are overblown and the morale difficulties don’t exist anymore. No word on the disheartening internal review of the project but one should probably assume that NASA will also say that there’s no way that happened either.
I’ve recently ripped into NASA over a number of issues and now, I’d like to add one more to the list. Denial. I doubt that the people working at NASA are suffering from complete denial about morale problems or major engineering challenges. But outwardly, they carry on like everything is a-ok and won’t address questions about why they’re trying to reinvent the wheel with Ares, can’t manage their costs and keep recycling old technology for constant missions to the ISS that don’t seem to have many major implications. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but we’ve got the mechanics of sending people into orbit and keeping them there for months on end pretty well. Some astronauts have even been living in space for over a year in a single trip.
As was brought up in the Space.com forums, there’s been a long standing plan to use existing shuttle boosters to launch the Orion spacecraft, known as the Jupiter Launch System. Why does that launch vehicle look so familiar? Could it be because that’s basically Ares V with the space shuttle lifter? If it uses existing and reliable technology and is about three steps ahead of where NASA is with Ares, why is the agency leaping backwards? It seems to be the new trend at NASA. Take baby step after baby step. Baby steps are great when you don’t have the technology you need to get where you want to go. But if you had the technology since 1981… then maybe, just maybe, you should consider a big mission that requires something brand new. Not a rehash of the Saturn V, not a reinvention of the STS lifter in three stages, something different and with major applications in the future.
So what’s the real problem at NASA? Is fear of failure pushing the agency back to just remaking what it knows best? It is lack of a real vision? Is it the result of the enormous budgetary strain of the ISS? Is their new exploration mandate too vague on details and doesn’t push hard enough to apply new technologies? Or am I missing something here?
