If there’s (currently) one good thing that came from President Obama’s plan to scrap the Constellation moon program, it’s that NASA will have to rely on commercial launch vehicles to send astronauts into space...taking a ‘shuttle-derived launch vehicle’ (SDLV) like DIRECT out of the equation. The only SDLVs that I would've supported were the ones NASA was developing before Obama changed its plans: the Ares I and V rockets. I would totally be annoyed if NASA gave serious thought to building a contraption that was conjured up by some chump on the Web. The way that several space fanboys talk about DIRECT is analogous to the way lots of movie fanboys (I’d include myself in this group, admittedly) talk about upcoming summer blockbusters: Getting into serious discussions about what they want to see and hope will be in the film...to the point where they start accepting rumors or ideas that are posted online as fact...and then realizing at the end that the powers-that-be in Hollywood created a final product that is totally far from what the fanboys visualized.
Case in point with that final (long-ass) sentence in the previous paragraph: The next Batman film. Type in ‘Batman 3’ on Google, and you’ll see rumors about Johnny Depp playing The Riddler, or Philip Seymour-Hoffman portraying The Penguin. Admittedly again, I’ve been guilty of writing fan fiction about the next Batman flick a few years back, but according to the NASAWatch article linked to at the top of this Blog, at least I would never write letters to Warner Bros. and/or plan to picket outside this studio to make the executives go with my ideas.
(If you’re too lazy to check out that NASAWatch article, it's about how the creator of DIRECT proposed to conduct a protest rally outside the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and sent letters to White House officials and other folks in Washington D.C. to influence space policy)
To end this entry... When it comes down to it, space advocates can keep harping on about a launch vehicle that they want to see become a reality, but NASA—like filmmakers working on the next Hollywood tentpole flick—will come up with its own rocket when the time (and money) comes. Fanboys on spaceflight and film message boards should realize that 97% percent of the time, an idea that they’re concocting online will remain just that: an Internet concoction.
That is all.
PS: That final 3% would be fanboys providing input on such movies as 2002’s Spider-Man (Peter Parker having biological webshooters instead of mechanical ones), 2006’s Snakes on a Plane (Samuel L. Jackson saying "motherf**kin" a couple of times in the film after it wasn’t originally in the script) and Transformers 2 (a ‘Pretender’ robot—played by Isabel Lucas—being included in this movie).
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