I’m so sorry, but any launcher below 50 tonnes at least isn’t going to cut it! Small and beautiful is just a slogan, it doesn’t matter much in terms of the vastness of space.

I think that this heavy lift is cheaper is a myth. The Ares 1/5 is going to cost north of $40 billion dollars just in non recurring engineering. Even at an average cost of $250M dollars that buys 160 EELV heavy launches at 25 tons each for a thousand tons to LEO.

By that time EELV will naturally evolve to larger capability as costs decline due to much higher production rates. This has been proven time and time again in the ELV world.

There is no way that an amortized Heavy lifter can ever compete with high flight rate medium heavy vehicles.

Also, that useless space station that some whine about is the key to making the whole thing work. With frequent launches and a robust operational ability in cis lunar space, reusable Earth to Moon transit and landing vehicles can be used. If you looked at the ESAS architecture in ten years there would be 30 defunct descent stages around the base and tons of ascent vehicle trash strewn all over the moon. The launch mass penalty to ISS is only about 6.3% according to both Boeing and Lockmart so that is only about 1600 lbs drop in throw mass.

With reusable transportation systems (multiple of them) a robust monthly access by humans can be put together. This also gives an entry point for Elon to compete for cargo and human launches and opens the doors to more than four government employees to go to the Moon.

Wake up, heavy lift is dead and deservedly so.

I thought that Mr. Foust’s original post on this subject, and his conclusion “Despite all the word games, it seems likely that, barring an accident of some other major change in direction for the space agency, the shuttle will remain in operation until the ISS is complete.” were right on.

The Shuttle will be retired after the ISS is completed. The definition of ISS complete might slightly change by a couple flights shorter (or even one flight longer), but it is not likely to change more than that (barring another major accident).

If we are in late 2010, and there are 2-3 additional Shuttle flights left on the manifest, I believe the easy decision is to fly those additional 2-3 Shuttle flights.

The cost of doing so will be enormous (it costs $1 Billion per quarter to extend the life of the Shuttle — and it will come on the back of NASA’s future activities. The political calculus for the President is as follows:

President’s generally like to avoid pain (no matter their political persuasion), and they are not likely to care that much about the pain of lost future activities since this kind pain is hidden as an opportunity cost.

– Al

While technically that is likely correct, programmatically it isn’t. The primary purpose of ISS was to provide something for STS to do. ISS hasn’t ever stood on its own feet.

This reminds me of X-33, only much bigger.

Actually, yes, or very shortly thereafter. This is one thing that Dr. Griffin has done right. As more and more Shuttle production lines are shut down and converted to something else, it gets more expensive to re-start Shuttle operations every month that goes by. While it will never beimpossible to retain the Shuttle, Dr. Griffin is making it so expensive that it won’t happen short of a real national emergency that would require the vehicle.

— Donald

It will obviously be more than 14 months out before the future of Ares I/Orion is disposed of. But it may not be much longer. For example, if today’s news from the Obama campaign is accurate, then under an Obama White House, OMB may be instructed to kill the program in the new Administration’s very first budget amendment. Or, in another example, the Clinton campaign appears to have given some thought to NASA’s future and may have someone already in mind for the NASA Administrator’s post. If so, a new NASA Administrator might be on board and making changes relatively early compared to prior turnovers in NASA’s leadership after a Presidential election.

That said, I’d just point out that predicting the exact timing was not the intent of my earlier post. The point was that with 14 months to go at the very minimum, debates about EELVs versus SDVs like DIRECT versus clean sheet vehicles like COTS are so much wasted breath. Until we know who has won the Presidency, what their objectives are, and what other developments have occurred in the interim, we won’t know the context from which these decisions will be made. For example, if Obama wins, the best NASA can do with $500 million per year is an augmented COTS and/or a small CEV on a minimally-changed human-rated EELV, and they may not even get that. All the talk about heavy lift would be for naught in that scenario.

“Ares-1 may yet be developed through political inertia.”

Obama aside, I’d argue there’s now a better than even chance that Ares I/Orion just won’t fly from a safety or technical perspective. Even when we discount Ares I/Orion’s high costs and long development schedule versus alternatives, its slipping schedule, and its precariously funded budget, the design is just too compromised to fly safely or to fly at all. A new NASA Administrator would be crazy to go forward with all the compromises that have been made to Ares I/Orion safety (lack of redundant systems, radiation shielding, aborts over land, SRB reusability and trend tracking, etc.). Even then, Ares I now has chug/rigidity issues that will either shake the vehicle apart or incur thousands more pounds in fixes that will make it incapable of launching Orion without fundamentally revisiting Orion’s size and requirements. I’m not saying it’s a done deal, and the Constellation designers will almost certainly continue pull enough band-aids out of their pockets to keep up appearances for Griffin until after the election. But if a gun were to my head, I’d say that the Ares I/Orion design is now in a downward spiral that it cannot get out of and the next NASA Administrator and White House will be forced to choose a different path.

FWIW…

— Donald