A bit of usenet hilarity for your enjoyment. This one came to me while in the shower, and the mental image was too cute to not post:
From: "Col. Mal Fnord, USSRAF" (23@globalfrequency.fen)
To: nttp://fen.tech.disc
Subj: One From the Vaults
Date Posted: May 10, 2014
I swear, man, the stuff you find when you go on a database trawl.
So I managed to ninja myself access[1] to the bigassed digtal records database Stellvia picked up when they bought out NASA's manned space operations, and I was going through some of the more recent stuff - just to see what was happening in the gap - when I came across some rather interesting Project Constellation dox.
For those of you who've got short memories, Constellation was the plan NASA had for replacing the Shuttle back before the wave hit. Basically it was a scaled-up Apollo capsule with some newer tricks in the cockpit and lifted on a modified Shuttle SRB. Yeah, the whole idea sounds a little nutty now, and it didn't sound much better *then* either, but with two Shuttles down and the other three approaching their sell-by dates a nutty idea was better than nothing, right?
Anyway, the Constellation stuff (Orion capsule, Ares rockets) got sidelined when the wave hit & fenships started plying the spacelanes like demented passenger pigeons. For a long time we thought that was it, that NASA abandoned manned spaceflight after STS-133 and didn't pick up the mantle until Artemis. It turns out that this isn't the case.
Buried in the records from around 2009 is a rather interesting engineering proposal from the Ames Research Center (the same people who specced out the Shuttle, fwiw) called "Orion Handwavium Upgrade." The idea being, apparently, that the Orion program could continue into the fenship era with a judicious redesign of the Orion spacecraft and the application of some wave. They used the baseline DRM Orion capsule as the centerpoint of the spacecraft, complete with the ISS-compatible airlock on the nose, then rebuilt the thing completely along the perimiter. All the stuff that was in the service module ended up distributed around the crew module, with added landing legs and a pretty novel antigravity engine system. The proposed design looks (I swear to Xenu) just like it popped out of a 1950s B-movie. Pure 100% American Flying Saucer; add a heat-ray turret to the belly and I would have no problem taking it on a UFO rampage.
The specifications were pretty limited, but then it was basically designed to take over for the original Orion spec so there wasn't a huge abiding *need* for a do-everything ship at that point. In all honesty the Orion upgrade isn't much more than a glorified shuttlecraft, designed to move 7-10 people from point A to point B. But the spec *could* handle crew transfers very well, along with basic resupply and other small jobs. Not a Shuttle maybe (he said with some small pride) but then what is?
So if NASA had this design sitting around in '09, why didn't they try and put it together? The answer is one acronym: TSAB. The zoomies were busy consolidating their hold on handwavium *and* Ameridane spaceflight around the time the design was produced, and any NASA-only design that required use of TSAB resources was a big, *big* no-no. Reading the dox, it looks like TSAB pretty much cut off access to the wave by anybody not directly working for them, and they waved a big fat contract for outfitting Franklin Station in front of Lockheed-Martin (the guys contracted to build Orion), *just* to make sure nobody returned NASA's calls. With NASA getting blacklisted, the design was tossed into Archive Hell and that was that.
Thankfully, this tale of sordid politics has a happy ending. With Stellvia now owning all the data, and since it seems they're looking towards an expansion project the Orion design might see the light of day again. The design is sound - I'd say it's easily as good or better than some of the stuff the Feddies have done at Utopia, the Warsies have at Kuat, the Senshi at Marginis or our efforts at Gagarin Crater - and it'd be ideal for work that doesn't require a Shuttle. Hell, maybe NASA could manage to outfit SR-01 properly now.
-- Not Nathan Fillion
[1] Okay, so I just had Sora make puppy-dog eyes at Noah until he broke and gave her the password. That still qualifies, even if it makes me a horrible person.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Soviet Air Force is now hiring Pilot-Cosmonauts and other qualified individuals!
http://www.sovietairforce.fen/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
From: "Col. Mal Fnord, USSRAF" (23@globalfrequency.fen)
To: nttp://fen.tech.disc
Subj: One From the Vaults
Date Posted: May 10, 2014
I swear, man, the stuff you find when you go on a database trawl.
So I managed to ninja myself access[1] to the bigassed digtal records database Stellvia picked up when they bought out NASA's manned space operations, and I was going through some of the more recent stuff - just to see what was happening in the gap - when I came across some rather interesting Project Constellation dox.
For those of you who've got short memories, Constellation was the plan NASA had for replacing the Shuttle back before the wave hit. Basically it was a scaled-up Apollo capsule with some newer tricks in the cockpit and lifted on a modified Shuttle SRB. Yeah, the whole idea sounds a little nutty now, and it didn't sound much better *then* either, but with two Shuttles down and the other three approaching their sell-by dates a nutty idea was better than nothing, right?
Anyway, the Constellation stuff (Orion capsule, Ares rockets) got sidelined when the wave hit & fenships started plying the spacelanes like demented passenger pigeons. For a long time we thought that was it, that NASA abandoned manned spaceflight after STS-133 and didn't pick up the mantle until Artemis. It turns out that this isn't the case.
Buried in the records from around 2009 is a rather interesting engineering proposal from the Ames Research Center (the same people who specced out the Shuttle, fwiw) called "Orion Handwavium Upgrade." The idea being, apparently, that the Orion program could continue into the fenship era with a judicious redesign of the Orion spacecraft and the application of some wave. They used the baseline DRM Orion capsule as the centerpoint of the spacecraft, complete with the ISS-compatible airlock on the nose, then rebuilt the thing completely along the perimiter. All the stuff that was in the service module ended up distributed around the crew module, with added landing legs and a pretty novel antigravity engine system. The proposed design looks (I swear to Xenu) just like it popped out of a 1950s B-movie. Pure 100% American Flying Saucer; add a heat-ray turret to the belly and I would have no problem taking it on a UFO rampage.
The specifications were pretty limited, but then it was basically designed to take over for the original Orion spec so there wasn't a huge abiding *need* for a do-everything ship at that point. In all honesty the Orion upgrade isn't much more than a glorified shuttlecraft, designed to move 7-10 people from point A to point B. But the spec *could* handle crew transfers very well, along with basic resupply and other small jobs. Not a Shuttle maybe (he said with some small pride) but then what is?
So if NASA had this design sitting around in '09, why didn't they try and put it together? The answer is one acronym: TSAB. The zoomies were busy consolidating their hold on handwavium *and* Ameridane spaceflight around the time the design was produced, and any NASA-only design that required use of TSAB resources was a big, *big* no-no. Reading the dox, it looks like TSAB pretty much cut off access to the wave by anybody not directly working for them, and they waved a big fat contract for outfitting Franklin Station in front of Lockheed-Martin (the guys contracted to build Orion), *just* to make sure nobody returned NASA's calls. With NASA getting blacklisted, the design was tossed into Archive Hell and that was that.
Thankfully, this tale of sordid politics has a happy ending. With Stellvia now owning all the data, and since it seems they're looking towards an expansion project the Orion design might see the light of day again. The design is sound - I'd say it's easily as good or better than some of the stuff the Feddies have done at Utopia, the Warsies have at Kuat, the Senshi at Marginis or our efforts at Gagarin Crater - and it'd be ideal for work that doesn't require a Shuttle. Hell, maybe NASA could manage to outfit SR-01 properly now.
-- Not Nathan Fillion
[1] Okay, so I just had Sora make puppy-dog eyes at Noah until he broke and gave her the password. That still qualifies, even if it makes me a horrible person.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Soviet Air Force is now hiring Pilot-Cosmonauts and other qualified individuals!
http://www.sovietairforce.fen/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"