Except for shuttle workforce retention. These are core stages that are not simply insulated with foam, and can be packed into transport aircraft and delivered to anywhere in the United States and beyond. We’re talking about flight rates that ultimately approach one per week, when full reusability and second generation reusable engine capabilities are well established.

You don’t see anything about VSE in there because there is nothing to VSE.

It’s a dead program, our space program involves space colonization in low earth and high earth orbit, and Earth and near Earth asteroid monitoring.

This is a COTS proposal, an order of magnitude more ambitious than anything out there, and I have presented a very real and attainable path to high flight rate space flight, an order of magnitude reduction in low Earth orbit transportation costs, and a very clear flight test method of reusability development, which preserves our infrastructure and workforce assets.

I have defined space flight for the next ten years at least. If after that you want to hang some SRBs onto this thing and go to Ceres or the moons of Mars, that’s your problem, but you aren’t going to do it without foam free resuable or retrofittable core stages with high performance regenerative engines, for the very clear physical and financial reasons I have outlined.

It just isn’t going to happen, and having your people lie about the veracity of reusable engine costs, or reliability, isn’t going to make it happen. The SSMEs are the greatest assets in the technological portfolio of the United States of America, and I am not going to allow anyone to trash them beyond salvage, and then resurrect them again 40 years from now, without at least speaking out against it, and providing some rational solution to save them, especially when we already have two very good launch vehicles on the pad, one of which incidentally already uses the RS-68 for which it was designed.

I’ll just run through the numbers quickly rounding them off for simplicity.

We assume $10 billion total for 50 engines and 250 flights through 2000, which is a cost of $200 million per engine, with five flights per engine on average. That’s $40 million on average per engine flight, but these engines are still sitting in the shop (14 of them at least). That is within a factor of two for estimated RS-68 engine costs. Some of these engines have more than 20 flights on them, and they are rated for up to 55 flights. With these kinds of flight rates, these engines already approach the F1 in overall cost.

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.shuttle/msg/snipped

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.shuttle/msg/snipped

http://www.angelfire.com/fl/Jacqmans/SSME.html

I have handed a viable solution to Mr. Griffin’s (and indeed your own) problem, and if you aren’t smart or astute enough to recognize that, it’s your problem, not mine. I have done what I needed to do to solve this.

If you want to retain shuttle workforce and assets, and you want America to lead in the post Sputnik space race Version 2.0, this is the way to start.

My ass is suitably covered by my clothes and my conscience is clear on this.

I see nothing in your proposal that works within the constraints of the VSE authorization or works towards the VSE objectives. What I do see is a light version of what we have been doing in manned space exploration over the last thirty years. The Columbia disaster brought home the fact that our objectives in manned space exploration should be worth the blood and treasure required to achieve them regardless of how the budget may restrict the rate of our progress as we move beyond LEO.

Swapping out the Space Shuttle for an EELV and leaving the mission objective of doing laps around LEO while trying not to kill the crew on ascent, in orbit or on return is not what the VSE is all about. Launch cost is only 20% of the life cycle cost of most space exploration as well so its ability to lower overall cost is very limited even if it was an utopian gas and go 100% RLV system. Shoe horning spacecraft into 5m is a great way to increase the spacecraft development and mission cost more than the actual launch cost as well. The Jupiter-232 hits below $5K/kg at around five launches per year a number even SpaceX can’t touch. Though SpaceX will still be safe in its market because beyond manned space exploration there is little need for 10m and 100mT per launch.

While I agree the US has some serious problems ahead us you aren’t going to solve those serious problems by shutting down NASA and saving less money than what the Federal Government spends in a day.

At some point someone is going to have to give everyone the bad news that Social Security will need to gradually reverted back to a social safety net for those who are unable to work due to old age but our not self-sufficient which I agree 100% with. How a nation treats the weakest among us is a sign of just how great it is and also part of American Exceptionalism which was part of FDR’s new deal.

Here is a series of American Exceptionalism statements that should turn your stomach.

-President John F. Kennedy, Houston, Texas Rice University (September 12, 1962)
“Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation. We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”

And so as to be bi-partisan;

Ronald Reagan, January 26, 1983.
“This country was founded and built by people with great dreams and the courage to take great risks.”

Ronald Reagan, speech to Congress. January 1, 1984
“America is too great for small dreams.”

America is rich enough to spend less than one day of our federal budget on space exploration. Again sorry for turning your stomach yet again.

No, they just fail, and then withdraw. It’s not such a big deal, it’s happened before, and it happened with the Russians. Just don’t let your pride stand in the way of fiscal solvency.

I have published my manned space development position in the form of a NASA JSC-COTS-2 submission, you are free to read it at your convenience :

http://webpages.charter.net/tsiolkovsky/proposal/IPO.doc

I’m not suggesting you shelve your ideas about clean stack SRB assisted launchers, I’m just suggesting that the time frames involved, it’s current financial vulnerabilities and your choice of engines and expendability are extremely suspect, given than launchers do exist that use these engines.

There may come a time in the future when space exploration strategies can be again entertained, but that time isn’t now, and that time is well beyond the several almost nearly insoluble crises that must be solved in order for sustainable space exploration to proceed. Your rhetoric only serves to further inflame an irrational and unaffordable enthusiasm for the fiscally, politically and technologically irresponsible acts that are the hallmark of this administration, and the popular electorate that elected them – twice now.

My personal opinion is that given the exigencies of of our existing planet and the human biological, environmental and political conditions that exist upon it, that your continued insistence and patronization of the now clearly untenable hypothesis of human deep space exploration via expendable heavy lift boosters, indeed borders on the immoral, if not unethical.

Okay, so you’ve told me what you are against. What would your space exploration policy be?

BTW American’s don’t surrender.

I apologize to all for feeding the troll.

http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html

Seriously Mr. Mentschan, your rhetoric is obscene. Not only are we going to destroy at the voting booth, we are going to invalidate are reverse all of your policies for the last disastrous seven years. It’s over, give it up.

Surrender would be your best move at this point. Direct is finished.

Dr Strangelove, make that 2:56 UTC July 21, 1969

I sure don’t think Neil and Buzz walked on the Moon THAT day.

Please by all means expand on the tin foil hatyness of my comments and how you take exception to an ‘American Exceptionalism’ view point. Just google that phrase for a definition if you already don’t know it.

Here is a quick quiz just so I can place your mindset in the proper context for your answers to the above.

Do you think George Bush was in someway behind 9-11 attacks?
Do you think that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon July 20, 1967?
Do you think the United States is the primary source of evil in the world?

Say hi to Slim Pickens for me

It’s safe to say most here prefer Von Braun over such an imagined (and quite mad) stereotype but you probably don’t know much about him either… ^_^