To go to a point of agreement between Paul and myself, though, certainly a key aspect of space exploration needs to be reliability. I don’t think we should be satisfied with 2 9’s, myself. We should be at 3 or 4 9’s of reliability by now. Instead shuttle blows up every 50 launches or so. 40 years into space flight and we can only manage one 9! How can that possibly be acceptable?

Dan, I hope you are right regarding the purge. Possibly the way Mike Griffin is looking at it, he needs to put people he trusts in key positions before he is able to make the more substantial changes required. I hope that is the case. Thanks for the kind words, and best of luck to you.

I kinda like MARS 2050. To send humans by the year 2050 and successfully return at least one of them alive with a probability of success defined as Ps = 0.99, all at constant budget.

Perhaps it could be a big step for a broad, and a just another small step for the humans.

The “purge” or “selective disemployment” of many NASA heads I believe will be a good thing, as long as the right people are chosen to replace them. Stay tuned to my blog (spacebound.blogspot.com) to read my recommendations for qualifications. I too believe the Right Stuff era is ready to blossom again, and I intend to help it along in any way that I can.

I do not understand, however, why just one generation later there is such confusion over Apollo and NASA’s plan for the exploration of space in those days. The Moon mission was an out of sequence step, granted. The original plan was to establish a space station from which a Lunar mission would be assembled and launched. Since we found ourselves in a race, that aspect of the plan was short circuited and we went directly to the Moon via the Saturn V rocket.

The follow on to the Saturn V was to be the space shuttle. It was to have the same capabilities as the Saturn V, and to significantly lower the cost through reusability, as well as increase the reliability and safety. Instead, the shuttle, in the post-Von Braun era, mutated into something that was half space station and half heavy lift, with the runaway weight increases consuming most of the heavy lift capability. The shuttle’s large living area gave it some capabilities to perform on-orbit science functions which had previously been envisioned as one key purpose driving the need for a space station. It makes much more sense to have a space station than it does to constantly boost and reenter your space laboratory, which is why the mutation had to occur post-Von Braun.

The shuttle ended up being a dead end vehicle. It couldn’t lift the resources necessary for a trip to the Moon, or even boost a decent sized interplanetary probe. It usurped the main mission of a space station, even though we ended up building one of those as an attempt to get back on track. Once our heavy lift capability is restored, we will be back on track to establishing Lunar colonies, mining asteroids, and visiting nearby planets. Until then we will have to continue to put up with conspiracy nuts claiming the Apollo successes were science fiction rather than fact.

So yes, the Right Stuff era ended with shuttle. It is ready to take off again, though. Let’s hope it never gets side tracked like this in the future.

I was contemplating that question the few days after the Columbia tragedy.

APOLLO had vision – not long term, not short term – say medium – a plan through the year 1969. But the moment Neil Armstrong stepped back on Earth, a new vision was needed. But there were no leaders at NASA to step forward, and there has been no leadership at NASA since then, and no leadership to understand how to incorporate the success of Apollo 13 into future designs.

Thus although a success, the low quality inspect over and over everything into the product, otherwise known as pre-flight review in this business, has lingered unchanged to this day at NASA.

The culture change needed at NASA is destructive testing up front, especially of the survival, escape, and rescue systems similar to automakers crash-dummy testing their vehicles.

Until the crash dummy philosophy is adopted and the cutlure change made, NASA and Griffin may fall into the age old trap. There were more missed opportunities in Apollo 13 than with Columbia. There is no need to regress back to the mistakes of Apollo, because NASA is still in that era.

So I ask the question, “Is the Right Stuff Era over?”

But to close the gap between Shuttle retirment and CEV deployemnt, on what money we have, cleaning managerial house will be needed when those managers may have contributed to the waste of the past.

The MAIN reason things cost so much was the Cost plus contracts.

Yes, and does the current NASA have that luxury? “President Bush’s budget request for Financial Year 2005 includes: “$428 million for Project Constellation ($6.6 billion over five years) to develop a new crew exploration vehicle.” Budget for year 2005 has been confirmed by the Congress in November 2004. ” ( source: http://www.answers.com/topic/crew-exploration-vehicle) That’s the *entire* CEV budget, not just the rocket.

Mr. Kuperberg doesn’t care much for data/evidence facts….