Once again, I'm amused by the inaccuracies in reporting on Orion, looking as I do from the inside out. This post at nasaspaceflight.com gets a lot of things right, I'll give them credit for that, but there are some glaring errors as well. Here's two:

• "The process is being carried out on the Orion 607 - the latest version of the vehicle". Nope...there is no "Orion 607" (yet). I keep seeing this number in forums and blogs and the like, but the current working configuration is either the ZBV or the CEV606B, depending on how you look at it (exactly what constitutes which has been the subject of a number of meetings in the past two weeks -- in practical effect, the two are parallel configurations which will merge in the near future to become the CEV607 point-of-departure baseline after November 15).
  
• The graphic accompanying the post is not the "mid design cycle Orion 607" (by definition, since 607 does not yet exist), and isn't even the CEV606B or ZBV -- there's a number of strange items on the backshell whose size, shape, and location don't correspond to any hardware that I know about, and there are three yaw thrusters rather than two. Plus, it's hard to tell, but it appears to include a LIDS and ATLAS, which wouldn't be included if this were indeed the (ZBV-derived) CEV607, barring a later buyback of the LIDS docking mechanism.
  

Amusing. And I'm sure based on past experience that someone will be along shortly to tell me that I'm the one who doesn't know anything about Orion.

Posted by T.L. James on October 4, 2007 09:33 PM | TrackBack