The Direct group made a better CLV and a lot of testing can be carried out on the EELVs before the CLV is ready.

Other things very wrong with ESAS is they are eating their seed corn ie killing research to pay for Ares.

There will be no moon bases or mars missions if you don’t develop high ISP propulsion and solar/NEP tugs and yes low cost access to LEO.

I think more money needs to be given to COTS like competitions and the CEV should have stayed a fly off vs NASA designing it in house.

Even Orion is anything but an ideal vehicle but unlike Ares it is at least workable.

The best thing to do with the ESAS study would be to drive a stake through it’s heart and dump it down the deepest oceanic trench you can find.

As for RLVs just because the shuttle didn’t deliver and the X33 had issues doesn’t mean RLVs are bad.

The only thing I see what the shuttle taught is SRBs and fragile TPS are bad
it had a better safety record then every other spacecraft before it except for Soyuz which was in it’s first incarnation much worse then the shuttle.

The Soyuz that flies today is very different from the Soyuz of the early 70s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11

Nasa never gave VTOL designs like DCY and rombus a chance and never gave TSTO designs any real study.

They also never gave have low cost simple expendables like seadragon any serious study.

Coming to a conclusion just because the rev 1.0 failed is stupid and maybe you should go read up on the history of airliners.
It took many concepts before the DC-3 came along.

BTW rev 1.0 of anything is bug ridden and expensive.

Griffin did do one very smart thing and that was COTS it could be the smartest thing he may have done in his entire career.

http://pmchallenge.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/2008/Presentation/Doug.Sander.pdf

ET-138 will be the last ET assembled, with spares for at least one more.

Considering that …

1) White House policy is to retire the Shuttle by 2010;

2) Mike Griffin is strongly committed to this part of White House policy.

Therefore, I feel confident that this contract extension is consistent with existing policy.

I am guessing that this ET contract probably relates to the two “contingency” Shuttle flights. SOMD has been trying to get the White House to give them permission to list these as baseline Shuttle manifest missions. Perhaps they are no longer considered “contingency”.

– Al

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/feb/HQ_C08008_ET_contract_modification.html

I may have misunderstood. It is not clear, here, the number of parts for how many tanks are being produced. At the very least, it indicates that the production line remains open. . . .

— Donald

Donald,

That would be new data. If anybody here can confirm or refute that NASA has more than one (1) Shuttle ET spare, please do.

– Al

— Donald

Donald,

It is relatively easy to add one (1) flight to the Shuttle manifest, for something like AMS-02, as we have at least one extra external tank as a backup.

However, we are shutting down the ET assembly line, right now, as we have all the ETs we need. Many ET supplier contracts are being turned off, and those suppliers are moving on to other work. It is not that easy to turn them all back on. The key people will take on other jobs, and become unavailable.

That said, there is reason to be concerned.

I am not sure what is happening to the tooling. I am guessing the Shuttle huggers are trying to protect it … but even mothballing tooling that has no official purpose is costly … if I am Mike Griffin I would have somebody (or somebodies) tracking this issue quite closely, and making sure that the tooling was sold off or destroyed.

Therefore, adding a couple Shuttle flights per year, every year, to the manifest is much more difficult. It is not impossible — we could restart the ET program, but it would be very expensive to do so. But stranger things have happened before.

Some relevant history illustrates my general expectations of what the Shuttle mafia will to attempt to do.

* In the 1970s, the Soviet Union’s leadership ordered all hardware related to the N-1 super-heavy-lift LV be destroyed. At least one factory manager disobeyed, as he hid the N1’s rocket engines. Those engines are the NK-33s, some of which are sitting today at Aerojet’s facilities in Sacramento, and will be used by Orbital in the Taurus II.

* The Carter Administration ordered the cancellation of the Rockwell B1 bomber. The DOD bureaucracy gave Rockwell advanced bomber money to keep the Rockwell bomber team alive. When Reagan took office, he restarted the B1 as the B1-B.

Could the NASA/SOMD bureaucracy somehow collaborate with the Shuttle contractors to produce the same result today?

If I was Mike Griffin, I would be check into this.

FWIW,

– Al

“NASA signs five-year $719 million International Space Station crew and cargo contract with Russia’s Federal Space Agency
By Rob Coppinger
In Moscow NASA has signed a $719 million modification to its International Space Station (ISS) contract with Russia’s Federal Space Agency (FSA) for crew and cargo services through 2011.
The firm-fixed price extension covers crew rotations for 15 crew members, six in 2009, six in 2010 and three in 2011, and the delivery and removal of 5,600kg (12,300lb) of cargo.”
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2007/04/09/213143/nasa-signs-five-year-719-million-international-space-station-crew-and-cargo-contract-with-russias.html

My understanding was that NASA had already cut em a check for 719 million for 15 seats and cargo missions, working out to the neighborhood of 41 million per seat. So the Russians had ALREADY doubled from 20 to 41 million. If I understand you correctly they now plan to charge 240 to 300 million for TWO seats per year or 120-150 million per seat?

I recall reading recently that NASA has bought a number of “spares” for the ET and SRBs, so, unfortunately, such an outcome might even be possible.

— Donald