While Administrator Goldin avoided dealing with the impact hazard,
he had planned for RLV, and initially had a small Boeing group
kept on working on a shuttle aeroform RLV as a backup to X-33. This group was shut down by someone.

Goldin intended to cut the shuttle over to NLS, and wanted to use it to
fly manned Mars missions by 2020.

Goldin’s original plan was to have a manned vehicle for use with the EELVs as yet another backup

Goldin kept the ISS going in spite of very intensely challenging hurdles.

Just my opinion, but we need to get an administrator in there who can shut down Ares 1/Ares 5 and get on with the Jupiter launchers as fast as possible.

While the Direct team is advocating a LEO fuel depot, I think it should be in Lunar Orbit instead.

My understanding (and I think I am correct) is that the primary reason for the 6 month rotation has nothing to do with the astronauts bone loss, and much more to do with how long Soyuz modules last.

To actually do artificial gravity (AG) on a ISS for a valid reason other than scientific curiosity, an ISS program requirement has to first exist. Then installing a device on the ISS that safely exposes astronauts to AG while meeting ISS operational and safety constraints becomes a reality. The key is to find a way for ISS Operations to write a requirement for such a thing. This can be accomplished by 1) demonstrating and acknowledging, before it actually happens, the ISS Program risks to crew health during extended duration stays which directly impacts ISS Operations or 2) simply waiting for something bad, related to crew health, to happen.

Having to rely on access means other than existing operational access means leads to more risk which is mitigated by means other than extending crew durations beyond the current 6 month limit.

I said: fund COTS D, fly Orion on EELV Heavy, and pursue the lowest cost, lowest risk medium-heavy (not super-heavy) lift for exploration.
This is probably some flavor of Shuttle C, but the requirement is cost-to-develop and cost-to-operate. I pointed out that this latter could be done much sooner than Ares 5.

I assert there is very little daylight between this and Direct 2.0.

And for the shuttle B or C advocates out there, we can and should do an impartial and transparent study of these options, showing all work and data that supports the final result.

# Human rating Delta IV for Orion

# Immediate funding for propellant depot R&D (in the beginning, the amounts needed are relatively modest by NASA standards since the current need is to climb the TRL ladder) however Direct 2.0 is committed to incorporating deployed cryogenic propellant depots into its architecture within a decade of program initiation.

# Encourage deployment of a human rated Atlas V capsule (perhaps smaller and less capable than Orion to serve as a crew taxi and to offer more affordable rides to Bigelow-style private facilities)

# Support and expand COTS and COTS-D

# Deploy the simplest most logical shuttle derived vehicle possible, an inline vehicle that uses SSMEs & the existing 4 segment RSRMs (with the RS-68 being the viable variant) — consideration is being given to foregoing J2X development in favor of a 2nd stage using 6 RL-10B or perhaps the RL-60.

Jim Muncy has expressed his willingness to consider Shuttle B, Shuttle C and Shuttle Z and therefore the Jupiter series can be easily added to that mix and therefore the Direct 2.0 proposal – taken as a whole – fits the Space Frontier approach rather well.

But rather than argue about all of this within the blog-o-sphere why not commission an genuinely neutral and transparent study to compare all of these various options? IMHO, the Obama administration should NOT choose a road forward without releasing the data that demonstrates why the chosen road forward is the right road.

What’s “quixotic” about the Space Frontier Foundation’s Ad Luna campaign “To establish a large scale, economically viable, permanent human settlement on the Moon within the next 25 years”? Or the Space Frontier Foundation’s “Teachers in Space” campaign? Are you claiming that these goals are unrealistic? If so, then the civil human space flight program is just as guilty of pursuing the same impractical goals.

“But is does give the opportunity for people to beat their chests and wax wroth.”

Apparently it also gives individuals the opportunity to employ an archaic, 19th-century vocabulary. [rolls eyes]

“Many of the private space projects, such as Falcon… have slipped as well.”

Falcon 9 and Dragon have actually been meeting their COTS miletones, a marked difference from Ares I and Orion (and for a fraction of the cost).

“They don’t call it rocket science because it’s easy.”

Space launch is a 50-year old enterprise. There’s no reason for it to be as difficult today as ESAS and Constellation have made it. Lame excuses do not justify poor program formulation decisions.

“I wonder if cancelling Ares and then throw open the choice of a replacement architecture to the political process is the best way to narrow the space flight gap.”

No one suggested throwing it open political process. As done in the past, a blue-ribbon, independent, external committee of experts needs to review the options and recommend the best path forward to the White House, Congress, and NASA.

“considering that there is argumemt [sic] about (a) whether Ares really is a turkey or not”

How does $8 to 16 billion cost growth on a $28 billion program not qualify a program as a “turkey”? That’s a 30-60 percent increase, in an era of F-22 fighter cancellations, nontheless.

FWIW…

No there’s not. With the qualifier “up to”, Mr. Foust’s statement is factually correct. We don’t yet know how much Ares I/Orion has slipped, but it’s up to five years.

“The gap was four years when Griffin started,”

Not true. Griffin set a goal of flying the CEV (now Orion) by 2012 when ESAS and Apollo-on-steroids was rolled out. That would have made the gap two years. See:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=18155

Constellation has failed to meet Griffin’s 2012 goal and the Bush II Administration’s VSE 2014 goal.

[quote]
and the 2017 date is not official
[/quote]

It’s only a matter of time at this point. There’s an article at Florida Today that tallies up the schedule slippage that’s already occurred in some of the milestones preceding the 2015 IOC:

“Ares 1-X test flight was scheduled for 2nd quarter of 2009 and has since been delayed to the 3rd quarter.

AA-1 Transonic test flight was scheduled for 3rd quarter of 2009 and has since been delayed one year to the 3rd quarter of 2010.

Pad Abort 2 test was scheduled for 2nd quarter of 2010 and has since been rescheduled for 4th quarter of 2012, more than two years later.

Ares 1-Y test flight was scheduled for mid-2012 and is now scheduled for mid to late 2013.

AA-2 max-q test flight was scheduled for 3rd quarter of 2010 and is now set for 4th quarter of 2011.”

A program can’t continue to slip critical tests like these and still hold to an IOC date. The bow wave of deferred work building up behind the 2015 IOC is unsustainable.

Even more worrisome from the Florida Today article:

“Some tests and test flights have been eliminated from the schedule altogether…”

Here’s the link to the Florida Today article:

http://www.floridatoday.com/content/blogs/space/2009/04/see-for-yourself-if-ares-orion-are-on.shtml

None of this should be a surprise to anyone if they’ve been keeping up with CBO and GAO reports on Constellation. Just a little over five months ago, CBO warned that IOC would slip 18 months to 2017:

“… the costs that the agency currently foresees for the Ares 1 and Orion programs could rise by 50 percent. Accommodating that cost growth would require as much as $7 billion more than NASA has budgeted, CBO estimates. Moreover, if NASA’s total budget grew by no more than 2 percent annually, such cost increases, in CBO’s estimation, would imply a delay of as much as 18 months beyond March 2015 for the vehicles to achieve the IOC milestone.”

See:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=29684

GAO has also long warned that the long tentpole work on J-2X alone will likely take until 2017.

“Also, that original estimate was based upon expected funding that NASA did not get to perform the work (i.e. the continuing resolution) and several other cost assumptions that were false.”

VSE funding shortfalls are smaller than the amount that ESAS busted the VSE budget from day one, requiring the cancellation of most ISS research, nuclear power and propulsion (Project Prometheus) work, and other exploration technology development.

“There seems to be this effort to portray Griffin as the worst administrator ever”

If our yardstick for NASA Administrator is getting actual human space exploration beyond LEO restarted, then Griffin’s heavy investment in a duplicative, incredibly expensive, and hard to build LEO space transportation system runs opposite to that goal. By this measure, Griffin is as bad as Truly in the SEI days.

“How many of these critics have ever run a multi-billion dollar technical program?”

Some of us have been involved with the formulation and management of space projects large and small. But it shouldn’t matter what our experience is. Even the village idiot can compare a new schedule to an old one or read a CBO report.

FWIW…

Mike did not get the budgets originally predicted because he ignored the administration in the ESAS implementation. Marburger made that perfectly clear when ESAS went off the rails from the VSE intent.

Factually Incorrect. The Foundation may have been the first to this party.

FACT: Almost 3 years ago, on July 24, 2006, the Foundation published a 18-page policy paper “Unaffordable and Unsustainable?: Signs of Failure in NASA’s Earth-to-orbit Space Transportation Strategy”

http://space-frontier.org/Presentations/unaffordable.html

FWIW,

– Al

PS — BTW, the “Appendix” is interesting. The Foundation makes some predictions of the future, which is quite risky. See below. Many of those predictions are proving to be correct (emphasis below is mine).

Assuming nothing significant changes, we predict:

• NASA will attempt to delay and avoid reporting to the public and Congress on the increasing costs in the Constellation program (CEV, CLV and CaLV). NASA public statements on the Constellation program will be characterized by a distinct lack of cost information.

• In spite of NASA’s best efforts to keep it quiet, there will be a constant trickle of news about mounting costs by the increasing number of blogs with access to NASA information. The Internet empowers and frees, and is the enemy of bureaucracy.

• As NASA’s credibility deteriorates, serious space reporters will increasingly ask NASA executives questions about cost (affordability) and schedule (sustainability)

• The Constellation Program will (continue) to eat the budgets for science, COTS, aeronautics, and other NASA activities

• The CEV will be overweight, and over budget

• To fix the CEV weight problems, the capabilities of the CEV will be reduced, or the size and cost of the LVs (CLV and CaLV) will be significantly increased

• The near-term CEV schedule will slip to the right

• The gap in U.S. human spaceflight will increase. There will be no U.S. government human presence in space in 2014 (unless COTS succeeds, which is possible but unlikely with only two-to-three under-funded winners.)