I'm a little late getting to this, thanks to three blizzards and a Christmas trip, but here's some interesting yet entirely predictable news about Orion -- Orion On Track But Overweight:

Last week, engineers from NASA and Orion prime contractor Lockheed Martin finished merging design concepts from Lockheed Martin, losing bidder Northrop Grumman/Boeing and two NASA-backed approaches.

But in picking what Hatfield, in an interview with DAILY sister publication Aviation Week termed "the best of all those concepts," Orion went about 3,000 pounds over the 62,000 pounds it is planned to weigh when it takes off with a crew of four to rendezvous with its lunar injection stage in Earth orbit. That figure includes the standard weight growth allowances for every subsystem.

"We have a number of good options to get that out," Hatfield said. "It's not surprising. At any point in time I expect to be overweight as we go through the design cycle, but then you have to go back through all your systems and find the weight."

It's worth noting that a good chunk of that excess weight is due to changes to the LM FPR configuration neccessitated by the merging of the NG/Boeing and Smart Buyer configurations and inputs from NASA ADPs.

It's dismaying for a project manager to be so blase about a vehicle being so overweight so early in its development. I'm sure Mr. Hatfield knows much more about these things than I, but I always thought that one was supposed to start off below the target weight and only give up each pound of management reserve and weight growth allowance grudgingly, not begin the project 5% overweight and diet down to what the (underpowered) launch vehicle can throw.

ADDENDUM: To answer Rand: "FPR" = final proposal revision (part of which was the final pre-award configuration, the baseline to which the changes Mr. Hatfield references are being made); "ADPs" = advanced development programs, the internal concept development and R&D teams from the various participating NASA centers; and "Smart Buyer" = the configuration developed internally by NASA during the proposal phase as a point of comparison for the competitors' bids.