Seems like a lot of cost and risk for a mission with little value. If you are going to send men to mars, don't do a half assed job, bring a lander and accomplish something.
With recent success of EFT-1, what are some possibilities of duel Orion missions? My understanding that two of them together have a mission duration of 4-6 months (please correct me if I am wrong).
Add a small hab in between them, could be well on our way to a Mars fly-by?
As designed an Orion can keep a crew of four comfortable and alive for 21 days. Not sure how it changes to 4-6 months just because a second one is added (which I'm assuming has no crew of it's own).
Actually, the Deep Space Orion strikes me as being about the first *sensible* aspect of Orion I've heard of. Using Orion as a Gemini/Big G precursor and with the baseline Orion as a dumb standard interplanetary re-entry vehicle *almost* makes sense. Perhaps not quite, but if we're going back to a Soviet-style incremental development process (think Soyuz/Salyut/Mir/ISS) then I'm all for it.
Perhaps a "dual" Orion mission would be a better idea...
Quote from: Coastal Ron on 12/23/2014 07:26 pmAs designed an Orion can keep a crew of four comfortable and alive for 21 days. Not sure how it changes to 4-6 months just because a second one is added (which I'm assuming has no crew of it's own).Two Orions with a crew of two would be able to stay in space for 84 days. But that assumes we don't add anything to the life support of the vehicle, while it's possible to add enough additional water and oxygen tanks to increase on orbit duration to 180 days, possibly even 210 days. We could also replace one of the Orions with Lockheed's proposed Orion Deep Space Vehicle, which would be a relatively affordable and near term option, and would allow a crew of three instead of two for 180/210 days in deep space.
So what happened to the dual-Orion concept? What killed it?
Just doesn't seem like a very efficient use of mass/volume. If only one of the Orions is the launch-return crew carrier, then the conical shape, independent RCS and heat shield of the second Orion is a waste of both mass and volume. Do they intend to return both of them for refurbishment and reuse? Does each one need its own service module?It just seems to me that a dedicated habitat module, cylindrical or spherical, would be far more economical and practical in a deep space mission.