Early yesterday The Tracker noticed a good gallery of pictures of rockets, real and imagined, that New Scientist put up along with some reporting on NASA by David Shiga. All sorts of launchers, new and old and big and small, are there. It looked like fodder for a post but time ran out. Today, no excuse. A few other reporters have also landed with accounts of ferment in and outside NASA as the U.S. takes a deep breath and ponders the right future for Americans in space, wearing spacesuits with flags on their shoulders. The goal of a moon base by 2020 or so, with Mars to follow, and whether budget or equipment – or logical justification – to do it are in the pipeline are all getting review.
Rockets are dramatic and provide a sexy angle for the larger issues of strategy and mission balance for the world’s premier space agency. Advocates for the existing Constellation program developed by the Bush administration, and for other strategies are making their cases. Much of the news seems to arise from a June 17 meeting of the independent Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee , chaired by longtime gov’t aerospace adviser Norman Augustine, in DC.
Other stories:
- AP – Seth Borenstein : NASA manager pitches a cheaper return-to-moon plan ; He focusses on one alternative to the Constellation program’s new Ares family – a space shuttle stack but with no space shuttle. Not as powerful as an Ares V, not a new idea either, but plausible and much cheaper, it says here.
- Fast Company – Kit Eaton: Will NASA Reinvent Its Lunar Rocket Program? ; Same topic, with more feature style.
An animation of the shuttle-derived vehicle in action is on YouTube and reveals that even NASA depicts sound in outer space. Plus, at a site called Universe Today, writer Nancy Atkinson ties the news up rather handsomely and throws in some evidence she gathered from “several NASA twitterers” that the possibility of imminent change may delay the test launch of an Aries 1-X rocket. And over at NASA WATCH, Keith Cowing comments on the new-old idea for a shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle.
Grist for the Mill: A site called Tall George has a polished, visual summary of the Constellation Project‘s architecture and many samplings of other concepts.
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