project constellation
Exciting stuff!
I wonder if it’s too late for my youngest brother, who works for Boeing in Huntsville, Alabama, to elbow his way into this program? That’s the closest I could get, haha. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get canceled like the X-20, NASP, DC-X, X-33 and all the others. Granted, they were all SSTO concepts; Project Constellation is something different, but still… Ambition has a way of getting squelched sometimes.
It would be pretty neat to go work on the Ares, but I think I would get a little frustrated with how slow the design would progress. Everything gets checked, rechecked, re-rechecked etc… Which I think is a very good thing, don’t get me wrong. My current design lead spent 10 years designing the Common Berthing Mechanism for the ISS modules (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Berthing_Mechanism and the pdf link at the bottom gives a more technical description). Those canceled programs though…those would be very cool simply because they’re doing something innovative. Ares I is a mix of the Apollo rockets with a solid rocket booster and Ares V is a spinoff of the Delta rockets. Neat stuff though!
-D
I can totally understand getting frustrated by all that. After two Space Shuttle disasters, the attention to detail and procedures have got to be incredibly dense… And yeah, most of the Constellation hardware (or even mission profiles, except for the earth orbit rendezvous on the way to the Moon) isn’t terribly innovative, but…the missions themselves are pretty exciting.
I’ll be keeping up with it all, as I’m sure will you.