Has Northrop\Boeing Won the Orion program?

NASAWatch.com reports that workers were out painting the grass green today in El Segundo, home of Northrop\Grumman aviation, so the plant looks better in overhead shots for the news. Apparently they only do this when NGC wins big contracts. This may also be why they moved some airplanes over to the UCAS program parking lot, just down the street from the CEV facility. This lot now sports an F-14, F-5, F-18, and the old YF-23 prototype.

Mike

It's Official - Project "Osiris"

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.

Project "Osiris" Gets a Logo...

NASA has leaked the new logo for the Project Orion (CEV) program, and it is eerily reminiscent of the Apollo Program logo from the 1960's. Both logos feature the prominent belt stars of Orion. Obviously, this would be expected of a project named after the constellation. But still, no one asks, why is Orion on the Apollo patch?

Search for Missing Apollo Tapes Expands

According to this very extensive space.com story by NASA shill Leonard David, the case of the missing Apollo 11 video tapes is getting more interesting. According to John Sarkissian, the operations scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO) Parkes Radio Observatory in Parkes, Australia, the tapes are almost certainly "somewhere" in the archives at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The story gives the impression that there is an ongoing search at Goddard of old boxes and storage areas. What's interesting is what comes later in the story; the possibility that the tapes may have been erased and reused. The case is made that this would be a tradgedy, but that due to the cost of the magnetic tapes at the time, it is not unthinkable.

If this turns out to be the case, then it will be more than a tradgedy. The original SSTV tapes are of much higher quality than the original TV broadcasts, which were scan converted, broadcast, and then recorded. This situation is starting to reek of the infamous Ken Johnston stories from the early 1970's, when he was ordered to destroy three first generation original sets of the Apollo hand held photography. Only his refusal to obey orders from NASA preserved a portion of this early generation photography.

Stay tuned on this one.