Your document is being seen as an interesting cartoon around Washington.It sparks discussion, to be certain – but so does Doonesbury.

You guys need to take the next big leap and put something out with names, and data. THEN I and others will start to take the powerpoint thing more seriously.

No, you are incorrect. I know this for a fact. Not even you can be at all places at once Keith.

Let’s make this a little simpler. Have you even read the Direct V2 overview?

Kert, thanks for the advice we have some of this beginning right now. We tried to get a write up in Aviation Week but they said it was too controversial. We received strong indications that they would get pressure from the big NASA contractors via advertising revenue via NASA strong arming them to do just that.

Every single contractor is running scared of NASA right now so they are generally waiting for the table scraps to drop on the floor after Mike covers his head count. I put even money on Commercial Human Space Flight industry beating NASA to delivering a crew to a space station at this point using 1/20 the money no less. Imagine if this happens in combination with serious problems with Ares-1 and negative Lunar margins across the board for the whole plan. The negative margins NASA is running with at this point in the design definition is unprecedented.

I think Lockheed/Martin felt it could get away with helping this Commercial effort once they were selected as the prime for CEV development. At least some American’s will be going into space after the Space Shuttle retires they just won’t be out of JSC.

This is why NASA is not playing to its strength with the Ares-1 by dumbing down of the STS. It makes more sense to build up from what they have now into an area that the ELV’s can’t touch, and form their defense of STS against ELV’s from that basis. The Jupiter-120 (2x the payload 4x the volume) of the best ELV could also do a number of exciting unmanned missions as well with out going over board in terms of spacecraft/mission cost like what the Ares-V would entail.

Kert, should this be in parallel or before the committee efforts? Our thinking was that until we get a major beltway group, OMB, CBO, Rand etc. to review the basic concept nobody is going to touch the idea for reasons the Keith doesn’t articulate well but are none the less fundamentally correct with how that town works. You don’t get access to those groups though unless the Executive and/or Legislative branches give you access. And they only grant that if they think the answer will benefit their political objectives.

So the order of operations as I understand it is.

1) Get the behind the scenes political support district by district.
2) From this the Executive and/or Legislative committees official request, Rand, CBO, others? and OMB (WH) do the studies.
3) After the official anointers and determiners of all things good in Washington agree that DIRECT is significantly better than ESAS the Executive/Legislative branches officially require that NASA together with Rand, OMB, CBO, others? evaluate the proposal.
4) All the news articles start up with “leaks” in parallel with this internal effort to help prepare the unwashed masses for the shift.
5) DIRECT becomes the new approach spun within the context of a limited budget and the Jupiter-120 is called the Ares-2 (for two engines) and the Jupiter-232 the Ares-3 (for three engines). The Ares-5 is still “offically” on the table for Mars but most likely will never be built because the Jupiter-244 (Ares-4) can deliever more payload to orbit. It’s a win win for everyone.

Well, they certainly haven’t asked me.

Oh, you mean RAND.

<voice=”emily litella”>
Never mind…
</voice>

All that will do at this phase is get the few people with common sense within NASA and its contractors working directly on VSE fired. I don’t think any solution to this problem starts with getting rid of clear thinkers. Do you?

It’s not their job in the present environment to dare challenge the all knowing NASA leadership. That oversight role is for the Legislative and Executive branches. My prediction is that if the FY08 NASA budget gets shot down in flames by the broader Legislature the NASA oversight committees will begin to look for other ways to protect their districts within the limited budget. Which will necessarily start with cutting out absolutely everything that is not necessary to transition the current STS into an inline HLV, i.e. the bare bones Jupiter-120? From that point we will be in a position to add an upper stage one more engine to get to 2xHLV that puts more mass in orbit than the Ares 1/5 plan.