Room for Four

I love the space program and grew up with Apollo, but this is a joke. We have an absurdly over-priced and under developed space station. The overly complex and expensive space shuttle is soon to be grounded, leaving the US with no maned spacecraft and having to rely totally on the Russians.
And now, the very questionable return to the moon mission has taken several years of work to find out it's too big and heavy. And after only 40+ years of progress since Apollo, they've managed to make a command module that looks 99% the same and holds one more person.

Two to one the shuttle keeps flying.

Looking at the picture I truly belive that the space program has taken one giant leap....backwards

The existence of a microwave aboard the Orion is surprising information. Is there a link to a source of that information?
Thank You

Damn! Can't this country do anything right anymore?

Who designed it Fred Flintstone? Why arent we sending harrier jet type technology into space yet? It ought to look more like Alien 2 than Barney Rubble. This really is a joke. We need to figure out ways to land on planets and be able to take off and get home (a free standing spaceship) not rocket solid and liquid booster technology. Think of the space shuttle crossed with a harrier jet only HUGE! Sorry NASA but I see more layoffs in the future if this is the best we can come up with. Why not have foreign privatized engineers design it? They seem to be doing better at everything else than us anyway including cars.

Check it out this is more like what is really required for space travel these days: a dropship and mothership.

I hear NASA is going redesign the calculator next. It's going to be made out of beads, string and bamboo, and look strangely similar to an abacus.

I was a teenager growing up with the space program. We should have been on Mars by now. But we lost focus. The space program has brought major advances in technology that has affected every part of our lives. But the return of the Apollo look alike is disappointing. The only Saturn 5 rocket is at NASA on the Cape at the museum. They may need the 7.5 million pounds of thrust to get this off the ground. We need to get the focus on the space program back.

"Houston we have a problem". Our management is living in the 60's and can't think outside the box.

This is silly, reducing the crew by a 1/3 will just add greater costs to the program in the long run as more trips will be needed to rotate station crews. I'm sorry to come up 1/3 short of your goal this far into design is just plan mismanagement. I'd tell NASA you get 6 people in your snow cone at the price you estimated it at or your all fired and we'll hire a new batch of rocket scientist. I'm sure with the current unemployment rate plenty of people can be found to do the job right. I'm a huge supporter of space exploration but NASA doesn't seem to be able to estimate costs worth a darn, because no one's head rolls when they are wrong.

It's hard to imagine that in the course of one lifetime (mine) NASA has gone from the Master of the Manned Spaceflight Universe to a beggar, hat in hand, groveling at the feet of Congress for just a few more dollars to keep the aged Shuttle Fleet open for business, or to buy passage on a Russian Soyuz. If it weren't for the International Space Station, NASA should be dismantled, its robotic missions turned over in full to JPL (Now, talk about a group who's good at cutting edge space flight!), and we put our paltry few bucks (No bucks, no Buck Rogers) for manned missions into the ESA, or maybe JAXA. I'm so embarrassed about the Orion Project, I hope it never launches.

cant get a much ugly looking design than that,
and still don't know reason why,
we want to go back to the moon again,anybody?

OK w/microwave - best & quickest way to make a hot dog while you're rocketing through space but how about a toaster for toaster struddle for that AM sugar boost!

Almost takes me back to my Apollo Test Vehicle Design Group days in Downey, Calif.and long gone North American Aviation, Space & Information Division.

Live long & Prosper!

Why are we even bothering to pretend we have a space program anymore? By the time it’s done, it will have a microwave, granite countertops, a sushi bar, a hot tub, a dog house, an IPod, a poker table and a 52 inch plasma screen with a 2000 disc DVD library.
Of course the lone astronaut can’t be heavier that a gerbil…

Seriously, the Soviet Union figured out the weight problem 40 years ago with Soyuz. In truth it was a proposal from GE on project Apollo that they “borrowed”. Make the heaviest part, the reentry module, which needs strong be heavy and strong to survive reentry and landing as small as possible. Instead provide a “living module” (they call it the orbital module) that the crew can move into after launch. It doesn’t need to reenter the atmosphere, so it can be comparatively large and light. Trying to scale up the Apollo command module to twice its size was a flawed concept. And it’s unnecessary. In the end Orion may end up being a Hummer in orbit.

Got to agree... Seems like an outdated concept... Not high on the priority list with the economy the way it is, but it seems to be a waste of money if we don't do things right.

Whatever happened to the developers of the "X" Project? I understand one group was able to build a spacecraft with privatized money. Why doesn't NASA collaborate with the developers of that project to build a light-weight, re-usable spacecraft instead of an aging, falling-apart space shuttle? Why not use the light-weight craft instead of this Orion, Apollo-era cast-off. We should have been to Mars by now, but do to government mis-management, we have definitely lost the way.

One giant leap backwards for man kind.

Wasn't the Orion moonstick project supposed to eventually do a mars trip? Even if NASA had the budget and ability to do stated projects; it would've taken too much away from secret ops and military budgets do this that seems unfathomable to both the Republican and Democratic leaderships going long back.