Note the matte black paint around the windows, a detail we didn’t see on GTA. The panel in view is from sector F, so the hidden panel on the other side would be its (essentially) mirror-image A, making this the weld at the 12:00 position (between the windows). [Correction: no, the welded-to piece is a cone longeron, not the sector-A panel. Derp.] The further away of the two windows is canted inboard to provide forward views for rendezvous and docking.

One curious but annoying (yet common) omission here is any mention that the work isn’t being performed by NASA but by Lockheed Martin. Unless you knew, you would be given the impression by the language here that it was otherwise – “Engineers at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility” being factually correct but completely misleading. We saw the same thing after Katrina, when NASA issued a press release thanking the rideout crew who saved MAF from flooding, never mentioning LM (the facility operator at the time and employer of most of the crew) and carefully phrasing things to imply – without stating it explicitly – that they were all NASA civil servants.

Why do they do that? Strange.

Three months ago, we successfully flew our second test vehicle in a short hop mission, and then last week we lost the vehicle during a developmental test at Mach 1.2 and an altitude of 45,000 feet. A flight instability drove an angle of attack that triggered our range safety system to terminate thrust on the vehicle. Not the outcome any of us wanted, but we’re signed up for this to be hard, and the Blue Origin team is doing an outstanding job. We’re already working on our next development vehicle.

Nobody wants to lose a test vehicle, of course, but this can actually be a useful development — as anyone who has read Henry Petroski’s books understands, you learn more from your failures than from your successes. It has always struck me as the wrong approach that Orion didn’t budget and schedule a bunch of simple test vehicles, with potential failures and learning from them in mind. Yes there are test vehicles, but they’re each quite complex and expensive, and the failure of any one of them will be seen as a major black eye to the whole program (regardless of what might be learned).

Fortunately, given Bezos’ ability to fund the project, NASA getting cold feet over COTS or CCDEV after a failure probably isn’t much of a threat to the ongoing efforts he mentions in the post.

I wish it had occurred to me to do so six years ago. The lower-level issues and decisions I’ve been involved in would alone make for some very interesting case studies.

NASA has reached an important milestone for the next U.S. transportation system that will carry humans into deep space. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced today that the system will be based on designs originally planned for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. Those plans now will be used to develop a new spacecraft known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV).

Peachy. Have we gone through enough iterations that we can start calling the new vehicle “Fred“?

This isn’t anything new, as this idea in general form has been floating around since shortly after the “cancellation” announcement in February 2010. What’s concerning, however, is the notion that the MPCV would be able to support crews of 4 for 21 days, all on its own. On Orion, that longevity had been been moved to a post-ISS-version block upgrade. If that becomes the baseline for the initial operational capability of the MPCV, it’s back to the drawing boards, at least for ECLSS.

NASA’s human spaceflight program is ‘adrift’ as budget cuts may doom deal

It’s merely a jobs/votes program.

I saw the same mindset in action when Mike Coffman (CO-6)  and – much, much later – Ed Perlmutter (CO-7) came to reassure us about their efforts to preserve our jobs even at the expense (if need be) of commercial space. To be fair, though, in a subsequent conversation with Rep. Coffman he did sound more amenable to commercial space, and regretted that he wasn’t on a committee with direct influence over that area of the budget. (Perlmutter? Who knows?)

I bet the Utah/ATK delegation will be really proud of their job-saving performance when they cause the entire Orion program to be cancelled.

(An amusing aside: the article cites February 22, 2031 as the launch date for a mission to Mars…which happens to be about six weeks before the launch of the fourth exploration mission to Mars in the backstory to our novel, a launch which includes the hab in which our protagonist grows up.)

Ten (old) pictures, three of which are nearly-three-year-old renderings of Orion, and none of which are of the External Tank, despite these being two of Space Systems’ most recognizable products. (There is even one picture of Atlas V, which is technically no longer an LM product.)

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of pictures of aircraft and other assorted defense items. One would think the PR squad could squeeze in at least one pic of the Orion ground test article, just to show the public that some progress is being made on the program.

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.