Marcel…I dont think so…most people on earth wont last in space or on another planet.”

I’m not sure I know what you mean. Humans only require food, air, water, gravity, a boob tube and internet access:-)

For $33 billion we were only trying to put men on the Moon back in the late 1960’s.

Now for just $17 billion were trying to put men on the Moon, plus fund a space station, plus build a new shuttle craft, plus operate our current shuttle craft. Yet for a tiny increase of $3 billion annually and choosing the SD-HLV over the Ares 1/V, NASA could probably do it all.

Sooo … for half the expenditure, are we getting about half the value ?
It certainly does not seem so, no matter what kind of metrics you use ( dramatic tv broadcasts per year, number of humans beyond van allen belts, rate of expansion into solar system, communist regimes going bankrupt by decade or anything else )

As far as lunar Orion being too heavy, I don’t think that’s the case, at least not according to the Aerospace Corp study that I’ve seen. Here’s a link to an article summarizing their results:

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/04/study-eelv-capable-orion-role-griffin-claims-alternatives-fiction/

That article is a few months old, so it’s possible that maybe Aerospace revamped their numbers since then(?) I’m not sure what the case is there.

Concerning available launch vehicles, for Orion

1. Falcon 9 can’t lift Orion, but theoretically Falcon Heavy could, which is 3 Falcon 9s

(Major Tom, or someone else might correct me)

2. I remember reading, somewhere, that a LUNAR Orion is too heavy to launch on a Delta IV heavy, without utilizing some of the fuel in the service module, which would need to be refueled in orbit (but Orion isn’t designed for on orbit refuel).

KSC has less than 15,000 full-time equivalent workers (civil servant and contractor). To get 500,000 letters, each of those workers would have to convince more than 30 of their neighbors to write. That’s not going to happen. (Heck, the entire population of Brevard County, where most KSC workers live, is just over 500,000.)

If each worker convinced two or three neighbors to write, a much more realistic goal, then they could hit 50,000. But 500,000 is a very unrealistic target that sets the effort up for enormous (potentially an order of magnitude) failure.

FWIW…

The excuse NASA used was that the Delta IV-H isn’t man rated and that its trajectory had black out zones where aborts weren’t survivable. Of course, studies have been done since that have shown that the trajectory can be shaped to eliminate those black out zones. Furthermore, it’s probably safe to assume that man rating an existing LV is a hell of a lot cheaper than creating a new one. Actually they probably could have created a man rated Delta IV-H and completed non-recurring engineering work and man rated the Atlas V-H for less than they’re going to spend on Ares 1, and have both rockets ready to fly sooner too. Not to mention the obvious benefit of having 2 rockets instead of just 1.

In the end they went with Ares 1 to protect the “shuttle industrial base”, which is just code words for protecting pet contractors such as ATK. We don’t really have a space program, we have a space workfare program, hence the letter-writing campaign.