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Still no public pics of the LAS “lawn dart”, but there’s lots of fun eye candy in this video, especially the beautiful slow-motion footage at the beginning of the motor ignition:

A few interesting things to note:

• The impressively crisp black and white footage of the reorientation and jettison
• The docking-hatch-view of the forward bay cover jettison and chute deployment
• The amusing (but very brief) cameo appearance of the jettisoned LAS in the background of one of the chute deployment cuts, weathervaning into a point-down attitude
• The firing of the attitude control motor, which appears as eight skinny flames near the tip of the LAS stack
• The fact that there is NO visible plume damage on the capsule or the LAS adapter cone (especially surprising given the incinerated appearance of the cone after impact with the desert floor)

Posted on May 11th, 2010 under Constellation, Orion, Rocket Science. Tags: Constellation, las, lockheed martin, nasa, orbital, Orion, pa-1, pad abort 1, white sands. Comments: 2

…PA-1 is scheduled to launch at 9am EDT  Thursday May 6.

NASA’s Pad Abort 1 will be the first fully integrated flight test of the launch abort system being developed for the Orion crew vehicle. The test is part of an ongoing mission to develop safer vehicles for human spaceflight applications.

Hmm…then again, maybe it won’t be.

Posted on May 3rd, 2010 under Constellation, Moon-Mars Plan, Orion, Rocket Science. Tags: Constellation, las, lockheed martin, nasa, Orion, pa-1, white sands, WSMR. Comments Off

Yeah, I don’t agree with this either, but then nobody asked whether I wanted the “porkulus” in the first place.

The sad thing is, extra funding might not have been needed for Orion if all the design changes associated with Ares I over the past three years hadn’t been necessary.

Posted on October 16th, 2009 under Constellation, Economics, Orion. Tags: lockheed martin, nasa, Orion, Stimulus. Comments Off