This site provides some core geometries and their effect on the thrust produced by a solid rocket motor. It can be tailored by the geometry, but not throttled. Hybrids can be throttled. I’m sure amatuers will have flown those for many decades before NASA launches one. As the Orlando Sentinel says:

“The Crew Exploration Vehicle is supposed to take astronauts to the international space station by 2012, to the moon by 2018 and eventually to Mars. It likely will be the only manned vehicle for getting to and from space that NASA builds for a generation.”

Sigh.

Oh please be careful here. I’ll say it again ESAS IS NOT VSE. Just because the Innovative Programs office is in ESMD does not mean you should paint them with the same brush.

The reason Centennial Challenges hasn’t announced rules or a purse for the prize is that the legal authorization allowing them to do so hasn’t been passed into law yet. Its not their fault so don’t use innuendo to insinuate that somehow its a failure on their part. Brant’s office is doing some excellent work at supporting other methods of accomplishing the VSE other than the ESAS.

Lazy rhetoric like this could easily end up causing unintended cuts to the one program I’m pretty sure everyone here agrees is a good thing.

Congress can’t cut funds and not reset expectation and goals of NASA as they have done in the past or Congress will be responsible for more loss of life. Also NASA has to be held responsible to maintain their projects within budget and mile stones met within a reasonable time. That means voters and activist must stay on top of congress to make sure they know the options as well as the pros and cons of each. It would benefit us all to find common ground on VSE. Doing half of VSE would be better than the last 30 years.

Dr. Griffin is unlikely to be in charge at NASA in 2010. He doesn’t really have much say-so about year 2010 events.

That’s another reason to snicker at a schedule that specifies return to the Moon in 2018. It’s like planning activities for one’s children for the year 2018.

He’s made it clear that NASA will cut as many flights as it has to make that deadline.

No, NASA recently put out a press release setting a goal of nineteen (19) more Shuttle flights. That many more Shuttle flights is sort of orthogonal to cutting as many flights as possible in order to make the 2010 deadline. Once again, Dr. Griffin probably will be gone by 2010, so maybe his successor will truncate that schedule.

Who really knows? I don’t. Maybe next year Bubba LePew and Rasheed Lincoln, the foam sprayers at LM Michoud, will start making better External Tanks, so NASA will go for thirty more large module deliveries to the ISS, ending in 2015.

…

In regard to the safety of the proposed new Apollo on Steroids system, let’s also remember that it will use those safe safe safe Solid Rocket Boosters which cannot be throttled off once lit.

The astronauts in the Steroid Capsule could have a Wile E. Coyote experience. They could hop off the launch missile using the tractor rocket and pop their capsule’s parachute, only to find that the ACME, I mean Thiokol SRB’s had done a 180 degree turn and were about to snag the parachute lines.

What I am suggesting, Greg, would not be to fire people like these astronauts, but rather to go back to a system that uses their expertise correctly. The reason astronauts rise to the top now is because of the power vacuum within engineering. When the functional organization went away and the job of managing personnel went to the previously technical program managers, it consumed them. The politics of the autonomous program has both lured driven them away from the technical realm. The astronauts have stepped up to fill the vacuum. Sure, they suck as engineers, but their operational background gives them a top level perspective on how the vehicle should work. Also, they have a lot of prestige and clout due to their fame.

So now we have a split of frustrated technical people doing personnel management, and management types trying to make technical decisions, and both doing such a poor job that astronauts are feeling forced to step in as pitifully inept integrators. It’s a goat rope. Every day you go to work thinking, hoping you’ve seen the stupidest thing ever, and then it gets worse. It is demoralizing beyond belief.

If you work on the contractor side, you work against the pressure to fail as a way to maximize profit thanks to the stupidity of a customer who actually pays profit on development. If you’re on NASA’s side, you face a contractor that only ever seems to think of ever more creative ways to be stupid. It’s a nightmare! I remember a stretch while working on space station where they would carry one person a week out on a gurney dead. It was that bad.

Most of the pressure comes about because the people working on the program care deeply about this nations space program and want it to succeed. Sisyphus has nothing on an aerospace engineer. It’s insane. We shouldn’t have to work so hard just to do our jobs. Your pay rate, the existance of your job has no relationship to how hard you work or how well you do your job. It hasn’t always been this way.

That would depend on what the time frame was — Congress hasn’t set any time frame, so it’s impossible to say.

At ISDC, Burt Rutan said he’s concentrating on suborbital vehicles now because he hasn’t figured out how to build an orbital vehicle that’s safe and economical yet.

Tying development to an arbitrary political timetable may produce the same sort of compromises seen in the Shuttle program.

Of course, this is all hypothetical because NASA still hasn’t produced an RFP to buy crew and cargo resupply, during any time frame.

> Congress just agreed to colonize the planets and support VSE.

When did Congress agree to that? Sending four astronauts to the Moon for a week is not “colonizing the planets.”

> Has Congress or a President ever set such a goal in the History of space exploration?

Yes. Forty years ago. Is this a trick question?

> Some good things have been happening. How about the merging of
> some X prizes and Centennial Challenges?

What about it? NASA only announced its “announced its intent to collaborate.” They don’t put up any money for the prizes that were discussed.

> As for space access, Mr. Griffin did what we expected by using Shuttle
> derived hardware. This is the cheapest, safest and fastest way to get us started

Well, the cheapest, safest, and fastest way except for all the others

> Imagine if we had shuttle derived vehicles built after the Challenger
> accident. We would be half way to the moon, the space station completed
> and seven heroes still with us.

Why would they be alive? Do you think Shuttle-derived vehicles would never fail? Or do you mean they would never have left the ground?

I never said that, Mark. I still believe that an incremental approach to the development of space transportation would be better than an immediate Moon rush — but since you think we’ve got to have an immediate Moon rush, for ideological reasons, I’ve proposed ways the government could at least do it at lower cost.

That’s called a “compromise.” It would allow you to get what you say you want — NASA astronauts on the Moon — while helping the private sector and the taxpayer at the same time. What’s wrong with that?

> So which commercial entity is offering lunar transportation services? Now
> or in the near future?

Boeing and Lockheed — how do you think Clementine and Lunar Prospector got to the Moon?Space Adventures — which I already mentioned. Walt Kistler’s new startup — I forget the name.

All of NASA’s recent space probes have been launched on commercial rockets. How do you draw the remarkable conclusion that space transportation beyond LEO is something only NASA can do when NASA currently has no space transportation capability beyond LEO and the private sector does?