Orion
Not sure yet what to think of this: Project Orion to Follow Apollo to the Moon. (Doesn’t seem to be anything newer about it in the news, but this name choice was confirmed a couple days ago in a memo from Skip Hatfield.)
I suppose like any name they might have chosen, it will take a little time to grow on me. But unlike the other candidate names which have been tossed around in the past few months, this one has a peculiar space-related association that will be hard to shake. On the bright side, though, I’m sure this will lead to much entertaining moonbattery among the anti-space crowd when they notice this association and begin to suspect CEV is a front for nuclear pulse propulsion.
On a related note, Griffin last week at the Mars Society Conference in D.C. sadly laid to rest any (however remote) hopes that NASA will revive nuclear thermal propulsion any time soon.
