Yesterday’s New York Times article on the space summit/budget is worth citing again for this very critical section: “Even as the administration called Constellation “fundamentally un-executable” on Sunday in announcing the meeting, the program passed a two-day preliminary design review last week.
In an e-mail message to people working on Constellation, Lauri N. Hansen, the lead for systems engineering and integration, wrote, “The final results showed that we have a sound design.”
Although there was no press release, the PDR is a significant milestone for the Constellation program. From NASA’s webpage: NASA Completes Constellation Preliminary Design Review.
NASA has successfully completed the preliminary design review for the Constellation Program’s plan to carry crew and small cargo payloads to the International Space Station.
Conducted at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the review examined the current designs for the Ares I launch vehicle and the Orion crew exploration vehicle and assessed where the program stands on its planned technical approach to meet requirements for a fully integrated mission to the space station.
A preliminary design review is one of a series of reviews performed before NASA builds flight hardware. The review process serves as a “gate” between development stages of a system and progresses to more detailed parts of the vehicle design, assessed to ensure the overall system will meet all NASA requirements for safe and reliable flight.This type of review process identifies technical and management challenges and addresses ways to reduce potential risks as a project goes forward.
With the completion of this review, the Constellation Program will spend the next several months completing preliminary design reviews for its spacesuits, mission operations and ground operations and beginning detailed designs for future missions.
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