Indeed you aren’t. So, I’ve hired some real NASA rocket engineers to come here and help us with the subject and to get their opinion on the matter.

Mr. Wernher von Braun, thank you for joining us tonight, we were wondering, if you had to choose between the Ares I or the Atlas V, what would you recommend?

Huh? Are you nuts?

Ok. Mr Krafft Ehricke, we’re so happy you could join us, could you be so kind as to tell us, if you had to choose between the Ares I and Delta IV Medium, which would be your choice, a launcher many years and many billions of dollars away, that might not actually work in the end, or an already existent underutilized hydrogen launcher with a brand new factory?

Huh, Are you crazy?

The experts have spoken. Just think of all the money they could have saved us on our rocket insurance, with just a single phone call from the afterlife.

I would say it’s because a certain organization and it’s present leader is seemingly unwilling to let the “straightforward technical assessment” happen.

What is the response from the “critics of the critics” to that? Let’s hear it, how is the above notion clearly and provenly wrong?

On the larger debate I’m a complete nobody and not afraid to say it but exactly what does the “critics of the critics” have except invoking NASA?

To me it sounds like they’re only in effect saying “you’re not NASA” or “NASA knows best” to the critics of ESAS and expecting that to be magically impressive. I’m no engineer but I know that’s the logical fallacies of ad hominem and argumentum ad verecundiam –quite underwhelming.

If every critic of ESAS only transplanted a Bush Derangement Syndrome onto Griffin’s NASA then sure the “arguments” would cancel out and one would be left with nothing but two groups of loudmouths, but most of the critics of ESAS I know of does not match such a description at all (no matter what they think of the Bush administration or politics in general).

Let me for the sake of argument assume that Ares I is technically feasible without completely changing the aims it’s intended for. Great but unless one also assumes that neither EELVs nor Direct v2.0 can achieve something comparatively similar or better for billions less then even solving any and all technical hurdles for Ares I is a moot point because I haven’t seen any refutations by the “critics of the critics” on how Atlas V avoids black zones or refutations of Direct v2.0. Nothing even close to the issues the critics of ESAS have raised and nothing remotely similar in detail.

I’m prepared to change my mind but not if fallacies (or worse) is all they’ve got.

Or the Constellation architecture really IS a dog.

It really is a ‘dog’.

at a point where we really thought “the big plan” might have had a chance.

Nobody in their senses intact ever thought George W. Bush’s big plan (VSE) ever had a chance. Anybody with any brains at all could see that they killed a perfectly good SLI for a ridiculous OSP, and that things deteriorated fairly quickly after that. Anybody with any brains at all knows that propulsion is the key to everything here, and that basically we’re back to Mercury days.

COTS will be wildly successful, and VSE, ESAS and Constellation will be horrible failures. It’s all written in stone now. The problem lies with the post mortem. Will it continue to be abject failure at NASA, and at the highest levels of our scientific institutions, and of our government itself, or will they suddenly come to their senses and realize that they’ve all been deprived of a post Sputnik education, and are just now enjoying the damages that have been wrought with their fundamental abilities to think clearly and logically.

I expect further outright folly and tragedy with this government in its throes.

But seriously, I don’t think that sharpening our fangs all these years is the sole cause for the intensity of it all, but it likely is playing its part.

I personally think it’s mostly pure frustration. That which “is” just ain’t living up to what so many of us have been hoping for all these decades, at a point where we really thought “the big plan” might have had a chance.

This hope had been reinforced by our witnessing what the folks under O’Keefe were doing initially after the announcement of the Vision: focusing on key technologies or new approaches (Prometheus being one example; the fly-off for CEV being another) that could leverage our ability to open up the solar system to regular, human exploration. Many got the sense that strong, foundational work was getting done in a way that broke with the past. ESAS and how it was handled seem to have brought back the old way, and all that targeted technology development appears to have gone away.

At the very least, NASA’s current exploration work is not being presented as anything extraordinary; NASA has almost gone out of its way to make it look ho-hum. While I don’t think NASA needs to feel obligated to excite the public, they don’t have to go out of their way to bore them!

Probably still not brief enough for you, eh Charles?

In that connection, perhaps one reason for the vehemence now is simply all the practice at second-guessing the community has built up since the end of Apollo. If you’ve spent so long focusing on where we’d be if Saturn production hadn’t been halted… if STS designers hadn’t made mistake X early on, or ISS planners mistake Y, or X-33 designers mistake Z… then you’ll be psychologically primed to unload all that “if only” energy on perceived mistakes in ESAS.

In other words, among the reasons the Constellation architectural choice got a reception very different from that of the LOR architectural choice in 1961-62 is simply that we remember the LOR choice. As T.S. Eliot wrote in another connection, “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are what we know.”

There you go again. Man, you’re just full of ‘hate’.

Where have you been?

The question rather, should be ‘What have you been doing?’ I’ve been busy analyzing launch vehicle architectures and space program architectures and committing them to print, in the form of a COTS proposal. Tell us, what exactly have you doing, except throwing ‘hate’ around on the internet?

The vitriol thrown at the Ares project and Griffin

Well deserved vitriol is not ‘hate’. It’s well deserved ‘criticism’ backed up by well analyzed and highly credible ‘alternatives’. What is your alternative, except more of the same of this :

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

How do you explain a launch vehicle that is five years late, billions of dollars over budget, and doesn’t work? Clearly vitriol is inadequate.

Extreme laughter is the only solution. We’re laughing at you, not with you.

The space program architecture itself is ‘laughable’. We’re all laughing our as%es off, which is as far from ‘hate’ as one can get. You aren’t laughing?

Answering questions about the flaws in Ares 1 on national television is not what he needs to be doing. It is a sign of impending failure.

Making accusations against U.S. companies on national TV is not how you inspire people and sell the program. It is TOTALLY off message. These words from Griffin just make it more likely that the White House and Congress will pay more attention to the issues surrounding Ares 1.

The more Griffin fights back on Ares 1, the worse off he will be.

Furthermore, I am thinking that a lot of people inside NASA believe that Ares 1 is the wrong approach — but they don’t dare say anything (if they want their job).

It is commonly known that Griffin will be gone soon after January 20, 2009. Everybody is waiting for that day, and some like Shelby are counting the days. The day he is gone, ALL the internal NASA critics of Ares 1 — who have been hiding to date — will come out of the woodwork.

After that, Ares 1 will not be around that much longer.

– Al

“Politics is not rocket science, which is why rocket scientists don’t understand politics.”

and Ares I will have low per-launch costs.

What were you smoking when you made that comment, and why aren’t you sharing with the rest of the class?

Anders,
While the VSE policy is not perfect it is the wisest national space policy ever. Also let’s not confuse the VSE policy with the current VSE implementation plan. No real study was ever done. Mike had the solution in hand before he was even confirmed. He said this on his first day when asked what he planned to do. His answer was to read the Planetary Society paper he helped write. ESAS was a tool used to support and flesh out the conclusions in that paper. It’s no more complicated than that.

At his confirmation hearing Mike said he was the smartest NASA administrator ever. So it’s no big surprise that he would think any advice that conflicted with what he knew to be true would be considered anything more than a big waste of his time. It’s a behavior pattern we have experienced over and over again since he was confirmed at all levels in the NASA organization.

I for one think the NASA administrator should only get involved in engineering when a solution conflicts with the authorization directives or there is a need to break a dead lock between separate approaches to the same objective that both adhere to that policy. It shouldn’t be a big surprise for anyone keeping track of things. Bottomline: I believe the American people deserve a little better plan for the +100 Billion dollar asking price of the VSE. Which starts with a plan that brings forward the best ideas we can get our hands on from whatever source.

There are a number of fatal flaws with the Ares-I only one is finally public after it was well understood by the engineers below Steve over two years ago. Bad news and honesty is not welcomed no matter how high up you are in the program just ask Skip. Starting to see a pattern yet? Skip was wrong because Mike is always right. Jeff nearly got it as well after he dared to move the schedule into closer alignment with what is actually happening on the ground.

On raw performance, the Jupiter-244 can place heavier payloads in orbit at a lower cost than the Ares-V should we need to. The Ares-V’s lower than optimal Thrust to Lift ratio at takeoff results in a poor split in the deltaV between the first and second cryogenic stages. Ironically, Dr Griffin’s and Dr French’s “Space Vehicle Design” text book does a good job of explaining why the Ares-V is not an efficient design from a rocket scientist standpoint.

As chance would have it the Jupiter is a more optimal rocket configuration for the RS-68 engine used on Delta. At the same time the Jupiter just so happens to be a true direct derivate of the STS that also avoids the serious programmatic problems identified in the GAO report on Ares-I.

NASA engineers had this all figured out over twenty years before the Ares-I/V pseudo STS derivate approach even showed up. Of course at that time we still had a few SaturnV engineers on the payroll. We just dusted off their experienced conclusions and brought them forward to today.

Speaking of today, the Ares-V won’t be built in this current funding environment because its price tag makes the Ares-I look cheap by comparison and look how easy it is to get that funded in what will seem like the milk and honey days of the VSE as we go forward. Assuming NASA engineers can find a way to harden Orion and the upper stage enough to take vibration levels of the Ares-I, vibration levels we would never require an unmanned system to take, we’ll wind up with a launch system nine years from now that is less capable and more expensive than what we can buy today. Any guesses on how long the Ares-I will last in that cost vs. value environment?

This Ares-I cost vs. value environment will also be characterized by an Orion so heavy (due to vibration hardening) that it can’t be used for the lunar mission, that is placed into orbit with nearly empty tanks (the same ones that need to be full so we can get back from the Moon) so it can be lifted by the Ares-I, all while costing five times more than an EELV that can actually place Orion smoothly into orbit with full tanks the astronauts will need to get back from the Moon in the first place (important safety tip).

Before we can return to the Moon we will need to ditch the Ares-I as part of the lunar archeticure, using an EELV to put Orion into orbit. After that we will then need to spend another 20 Billion to build just the Ares-V at the same time our country is going through the highest pressure on its discretionary spending since World War II.

My guess is we just sit back and watch this “hoping for the best” train unfold, the Ares-I will be canceled after a few flights and we’ll send Orion to the ISS using EELV’s and ditch the VSE altogether because we can’t afford the Ares-V.

Then it will be a more cost effective repeat of the last thirty years until we have a catastrophic failure of an aging ISS killing all crew members. At which point a new generation will ask the very same questions this one asked after Columbia. What are we accomplishing in manned space exploration that is worth the blood and treasure we are expending?

The VSE policy is fine it’s the implementation of VSE as dictated by the 90 day study ESAS study that is wrong. Fix ESAS and you fix VSE.

And please frame your responses in the form of counter points to the facts that I present. Bad news is never pleasant and almost always comes across as a bit negative even when it is the truth. I’m sorry if I haven’t found a better way to sugar coat this maybe you would be better at it?

Now do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill?