Reply #36: Confusing post [View All]

[pmbryant]

Not sure why you bring up Orion, which was a long time ago, and never got very far, and doesn't appear relevant to either the proposed Moon/Mars stuff, or this Prometheus project you brought up.

Prometheus doesn't look anything like Orion to me, except that it also involves the word "nuclear". Orion would have used nuclear bombs, but the modern-day Prometheus project is supposed to find ways to use nuclear energy (via fission reactors or radio-isotope based systems) to power spacecraft.

It's not even clear to me that Prometheus is a funded project. The info on NASA's web site about it says "pending approval by Congress".

And it's quite a stretch to think that the Pentagon needs to use a NASA project to accomplish its goals in space. The Pentagon has a lot more money than NASA does, has its own launch center (Vandenberg Air Force Base) and has its own rockets. So I'm rather baffled why so many here think that the Pentagon is trying to infiltrate NASA projects. It's not like they are hurting for money over there under Bush/GOP control!

And the stuff about space-based lasers and Richard Perle doesn't appear to me to be connected to NASA at all.

:shrug:

--Peter