credit NASA / caption: “original” plan for lunar development, what does CxP know about the lunar goals?
Another NASA presentation slide from the 17 June Norm Augustine led review of US human spaceflight plans committee meeting. Presented by NASA exploration systems mission directorate associate administrator Doug Cooke and his Constellation prgramme manager Jeff Hanley, according to the presentation’s first page, some of its bullet points raise further questions
It says Orion is designed for land landing contingencies but I understand that the airbags have been deleted so I am guessing that an Orion crew exploration vehicle capsule making an off-nominal land landing is not going to be reusable but probably surviveable
The other interesting bits are this $35 billion cost figure for 2015 IOC (whatever happened to those $40-plus billion figures?) and the reference to an “original plan” that had $9 billion for lunar development (that does add up to $44 billion)
This and the other presentations in today’s Hyperbola blog posts can be found here and eventually these and more will no doubt appear here
