Fire up the Power Point! Set the viewgraphs to boundless optimism!

[james_davis_nicoll]

A worthy successor to GHWB's Space Exploration Initiative and GWB's Vision for Space Exploration: NASA's crewed rockets are absolutely, positively going to Mars; please don't bring up all the previous times they promised that and it didn't happen.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The "Orion" name was chosen as part of the Constellation/Aries program of the GWB years. I remember a lot of people complaining about it at the time on the basis that "Project Orion" was, of course, something else. Most of Constellation got cancelled, Aries got replaced by SLS as the proposed launcher, but the Orion capsule was the bit of Constellation that survived intact.

NASA is spinning developing this thing without a funded mission as prudent infrastructure development, but that was what they said about the Shuttle as well. It'd be nice to have something in the pipeline. I'm skeptical that the asteroid-retrieval mission will actually happen, given that nobody with control over funding seems particularly enthusiastic about it.

Matt M.