According to this
Space.com story and
this official announcement, NASA has now officially acknowledged that its new Apollo-descended space capsule has been named "Orion." This story was first broken on July 20th, 2006, by Collectspace.com.
The entire history of the "Orion" connection to the Moon and NASA's lunar space programs should be very familiar to regular visitors to Richard Hoagland's Enterprise Mission web site. The initial "Orion connection" came way back in the early 1960's, with the original Apollo program patch.
The Apollo patch has always remained unexplained, at least as far as identifying exactly what Orion has to do with the moon. As Hoagland has pointed out many times, Orion has no known mythological connection to the Moon, but rather to the Egyptian god Osiris.
Now, three decades after Apollo, NASA returns to the Moon for the second time under the banner of Osiris, through his stellar representation as Orion. Nowhere in any of the NASA announcements do they mention the earlier patch. Instead, NASA explains that Orion was chosen as the name simply because astronauts frequently use the constellation for navigation purposes.
To anyone who has followed our work, this excuse is laughable. NASA has always had an obsession with Orion, even to the naming of the Apollo 18 LM. The question the press should be asking is why Orion is so frequently connected with our space program, and what the symbolism is meant to represent.