And since I don’t have time for anything original today, I’ll link to a post from 2006 wherein I revisit the 1976 Bicentennial exhibitions at Kennedy Space Center…which I actually visited for real just a couple days before the Bicentennial day proper.

Coffman urges Obama to protect Orion jobs

Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, sent a letter to President Barack Obama Thursday urging him to protect jobs in NASA’s Orion crew-capsule program.

I’d much prefer, however, that he get behind the commercial crew-cargo policy proposed to replace it, so that there might be more jobs created in the broader space industry. Clinging to the program of record after it has been shown to be unsustainable and unaffordable, merely forestalls the inevitable and squanders an opportunity (and resources) to shift to a more open-ended policy.

I’d expect a Colorado Republican to be more amenable to a capitalist policy than this. Especially an incumbent whose district includes several space-related companies which would benefit from growing markets and the creative influence of competition.

I just hope they don’t wait too long for a commercial provider to emerge. There’s scuttlebutt going around that they are working with multiple contenders to assure that they aren’t left without some means of getting to their station(s).

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)

The one-minute, 35-second test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., took the capsule higher — 3,886 feet — and farther down range — 6,919 feet — than anticipated.

“That motor was quite a performer,” said Deputy Test Director Jay Estes. “You might not want to be riding in there.”

That’s the truth in more ways than he intended, I’m sure. (And I can’t be the only one who finds it amusing that one of the guys launching a big solid rocket is named “Estes”.)

Were the program to be continued, this excess capability might actually be a good thing to have, given how much the capsule has changed since the PA-1 design was frozen (more to the point: how much more it weighs now).

Landing was gentler than expected, but a heavier capsule would work against that:

The boilerplate capsule floated down to the desert floor under the three red-and-white main chutes, slowed enough by them that the telemetry system continued to operate after impact. Estes said test engineers received all of the data they expected to receive.

“It was a beautiful flight,” he said. “That went like clockwork from what I could see.”

Don Reed, the NASA test director, said the capsule touched down at about 24 feet per second (fps), less than the 33 fps impact velocity predicted at the outset. That sort of data will be helpful as NASA refines its predictive models for future developments.

The best part of the test, though, was that the discarded motor stack turned into an enormous lawn dart. I don’t have permission to share the pics that were floating around the office today, but the shots of the burning adapter cone sticking up out of the desert floor are awesome — since the entire 40-odd-foot-tall tower above it is buried nearly vertically into the ground, along with about 40% of the cone itself, with just a small bulge of dirt humped up around it. It’s such a perfect needle-jab that it’s ridiculous. As for the rest of the hardware, the early reports suggested that, given another LAS, the boilerplate capsule and even the separately-jettisoned forward bay (parachute) cover could have been launched again in short order.

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.

I don’t know that he didn’t, or didn’t offer to do so (the article doesn’t say), but it seems like the obvious thing to do for a guy with a passion and a couple billion dollars in the bank. Indeed, a sponsorship arrangement with NASA would have been a coup for both. Trade Cameron the rights to market the resulting imagery in exchange for underwriting the camera, let him produce a theatrical 3D documentary using it, and both win: Cameron cleans up at the box office, and NASA gets a great PR and education/information outreach opportunity.

Came across this display in the outer lobby on my way out of the office this evening – apparently, another attempt by the earnest young engineers squad to gather petition signatures in favor of preserving the program of record.

UPDATE: So, Thursday there were a couple of the aforementioned earnest young engineers staffing the table (presumably on their own time). The purpose of this signature drive was not, as it turns out, to encourage Colorado’s Congressional delegation to preserve the program of record, but to thank them for having “saved Orion”.

Which makes me wonder if there was a table like this at South Park West, where the LAS and service module teams are located…