The explanation is based on the premise that, sooner or later, folks will read his campaign documents. Maybe even the McCain campaign.
Lee Cary

Actually, it’s the worst of all worlds, because for all their expense, they actually don’t let you avoid that. For instance, Ares V wouldn’t be large enough to do a Mars mission (of course, it turns out that the current design isn’t even large enough to do a lunar mission), so you have to learn how to do it anyway. Any suitably ambitious space program will always come up with a mission larger than a single launch of even the largest vehicle in the stable will perform.

On the other hand, Mike Griffin’s NASA hasn’t shown much ambition, to date.

— Donald

— Donald

A man and his BIG ROCKET, lets build it and go what is there even to think about! Then you post that and I laugh because we KNOW what it will mean if NASA was planning on doing it. It will take three times as long to develope, design and build, cost three times as much, and will launch three times less then it is supposed to. When you look at that history you’re right, is it really a bad thing if we didnt even bother with it.

We (collectively as a nation) would probably be better off not bothering with it and it will just slow down commerical solutions to HLVs.

You say that like it’s a bad thing…

I believe if the moon mars and beyond is trimmed from NASA in the next adminstration, there will be no Ares V to worry about, it would automatically get cut with the moon, there wouldnt be enough payload justification to build it. A telescope maybe, and new space station, but I highly doubt they would get funded, so without the moon the Ares V is gone too.

— Donald

Yes, which would make it in complete keeping with federal space policy for the past half century in its lunacy.

This would be a very unfortunate outcome indeed. To go through the decade of pain to build Ares/Orion, and to have no lunar mission and Ares V follow-on, would completely waste the tens of $billions, and worse, would result in an expensive system that politics would dictate has to be used for something – presumably squashing any U.S. commercial ISS transportation, especially crew transportation.

As Rand said in the article: “Clinton does want to replace the shuttle, but the concern among some in the space community is that she will do this by continuing Ares 1 and Orion—just not for the moon. This suggests that NASA would remain the primary carrier of passengers to the ISS for its astronauts, depriving the private space transportation sector of a potential market”.

Even NASA Administrator Griffin says that Ares/Orion without the lunar mission makes no sense. It seems like politics and budget are likely to give us just that, though. It would be smart for Griffin, who I assume, as he’s implied, does not want this outcome, to do things to discourage it, like:

– make the lunar mission more attractive, even if funds have to come from Ares/Orion (which are, after all, unlikely to be cancelled with the political/job interests involved), by doing more of what we can do now, like

* kicking off COTS ISS crew transportation so it’s there before Ares/Orion

* sending more robots to the Moon for diverse science and ISRU or other human-related work (he’s made a start on the robots at least)

* starting serious work on the lunar transportation (eg: Ares V, LSAM)

* getting international support for the lunar mission

* and getting commercial interests, well, interested (eg: putting fuel depots in the transportation architecture)

– and/or give Ares/Orion some other, intermediate job besides ISS transportation and the lunar mission … like servicing science satellites, for example

– or cancel Ares/Orion altogether and try something less ambitious per launch