zerocool

Comment Threads

• Eagle_Eye commented on A Wet Moon Is Hot Once Again
  The budget will need to be assigned to JSC Engineering, its not something they can skim off other projects, its too large. That said wouldn't it add more drama and excitement to the 1000 day milestone if a similar but with slightly different objectives project were also announced and led from another center like say MSFC. This would add a little competition to the mix and serve the role the REDS did during Apollo. JSC vs. MSFC, Texas vs. Alabama where can I buy tickets. And KSC wins either way(so much for one NASA... Hehehehehe)...

• dbooker commented on A Wet Moon Is Hot Once Again
  The only issue that I can see on this is that this was tried before with just in house engineering and it was canceled. It was the X-38 See Wayne Hale's 11/5/09 blog. http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/waynehalesblog. Too bad the engineers that were developing this spacecraft didn't do what Franklin Chang-Diaz did with the VASIMR technology and sign a deal with NASA to take it private. I guess it may be hard to be think like an entrepreneur when you're a civil servant engineer....

• Maxwell commented on A Wet Moon Is Hot Once Again
  Three years to put a lander on the moon? Seems a bit redundant at this point. Lcross worked the way it did to get around the need for a more expensive ground robot. We've learned about as much as we're going to before someone goes to the moon and takes hundreds of direct samples from multiple target craters. Not to say another robot is a bad idea, but the chances are good its results will be either inconclusive or the selection too limited for scientists to believe there is as much water as long range scans show....

• bombcatcher commented on A Wet Moon Is Hot Once Again
  X-38 was cancelled in 2002. Flight-testing began in March of 1998 with vehicle 131, which means it was in design and fab long before that. Hale, in his blog, refers to X-38 as a skunk work project. He might try to attach that description to X-38, but truth be told it missed one key idea -> skunk work type projects should not take that long. The real issue with X-38 was it took too darn long. If you look at almost every major Lockheed Skunk Works project, they were all completed very quickly. Extraordinarily quickly. So, it appears that JSC...

• BrianM commented on A Wet Moon Is Hot Once Again
  Super! First bright news we've seen in a really long time. It sounds like an excellent program, on a timely basis and schedule, and really is exactly what has been required for 10-15 years in order to train some NASA JSC people in how to carry out a project succesfully. The last effort anything like it was X-38, and before that was NASA Mir. We've just been marking time and going in bureaucratic circles since. It is surprising that NASA public relations does not make use of news like this; following on the heels of the LCROSS water discovery, it...