Larry Gagliano, Orion project manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, photographed in front of the spaceship’s heat shield. Credit: Lee Roop/AL.com
Temperature is not heat, as anyone who puts out
a candle with their finger knows.
In 1962(?) Kennedy called for landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade. Had the current NASA leadership been around then we would have had Project Gemini somewere in the mid 1970’s and landed on the moon in the 80’s. Let private industry do it.
I read an interesting idea about a spacecraft piggybacking on a hyperbolic asteroid. Hyperbolic asteroids and comets pass once through the inner Solar System before being flung out to interstellar space along s hyperbolic trajectory.
The spacecraft would be taken to rendezvous with the asteroid by a transport spaceship, so when it landed on, and attached itself to the asteroid, it would have maximum fuel for its thrusters and its ion drive.
Its thrusters would be used to slowly maneuver the likely rotating asteroid so that the spaceship would be at the relative “back” of the asteroid. Then its ion drive would very gradually increase the speed of the asteroid, so that by the time it reached interstellar space it would have tremendous velocity.
All of that for the primary purpose of using the asteroid as a shield against the vast number of other space bodies it would collide with.