orion

So I've been playing around with a conceptual 2010s spaceflight timeline, and the big change is that Orion is cancelled with Constellation, and NASA starts a "Commercial Exploration Program" for commercial lunar crew capsules (SPOILER: They pick Dragon and Starliner). This leads to less money...

Since the early years of this century, NASA has been struggling to turn Shuttle-derived hardware into a heavy lift vehicle. It hasn't gone well. Underfunding, politically imposed design decisions and a lack of a clear purpose has resulted in a slow-motion disaster which looks bound to deliver...