Well that all depends on your CONOPS. Say you do land landing vs splash down there would be a difference in your life cycle cost. If it is reusable also. It may not be cheap but compared with Shuttle it may sound like it. So I don’t know you can just draw a statement like this without more analysis on your CONOPS and design requirements.

It may cost less to design and develop, but it doesn’t cost less to operate.

I am not arguing they could have done it in some other way! BUT they wanted to preserve the solid rocket motor expertise in particular. And it looked like a DOD “requirement”… Anyway.

Remember better faster cheaper? I would venture it was the basis of the decisions for all of the Constellation program. We know where this philosophy leads…

I have my personal preferences some of which is based on analysis as to what RV we could use. But it’s a different story.

When NASA made the decision to save the workforce in the 1970’s they didn’t build a Saturn derived launcher, they started with a clean sheet.

The Shuttle may not have lived up to expectations but it was a lot better then a capsule on a firecracker and its sad we are being forced back to that type of system. I don’t see why a similar clear sheet decision for a new HLV would not only save the workforce but also education them in building launch vehicles, a skill that NASA is now lacking as you stated.

The reason why you choose a capsule over something else is that the most important portion of the flight (hypersonics) does not care whether it is a capsule or anything else. A capsule is much easier to design than anything else and will cost much less. It is not easy though. And the choice of the OML ought to be based on something else than national pride, hence CEV looking like Apollo. All of the accumulated experience tends to show that a Soyuz like OML would be much safer but again the USA flying a “Soyuz”? Anyway.

Again the problem was to educate the workforce at the same time you were designing and building all those vehicles. Hence the time required with the given budget. Forces pushing towards this design were essentially fooling themselves. Period. Not that any other design would have been much quicker.

The choice for Shuttle derived vehicles was precisely to save the workforce. How can you then save money? This “saving money” is all political baloney, sorry.

This is a government program. Why would you think that efficiency is on the table at all as a criterion, let alone a significant one?

Yes, there are challenges with it, but they are much less then were faced with Apollo when no one had done it before. And have much more powerful tools to work the problem. So its still incredible its going to take them longer to build Orion then it took with the Apollo Command Module.

I know, jobs will disappear as well. But it still boggles the mind to think it will be more efficient to drag 35 year old technology into a 21st Century HLV then start with a clean sheet.

Absolutely wrong. It may look like Apollo but it is very different. Different enough that all the aerodynamics and aerothermal environment had to be redone. Granted a lot with computer simulation unlike Apollo.

“And of course you have the legacy data from Apollo. ”

Not as much as you would like to believe. A lot of data was lost. A lot.

“That is why I find it very difficult to see why an oversize clone of the Apollo Command Module, simply updated with new electronics and materials, is going to take so long.”

The reason is that none of those working Orion were around during Apollo, none. So people have to be re-educated. Such is life.

“You aren’t really breaking any new ground except perhaps in the land recovery aspect, and I don’t see a problem with going back to ocean recovery.”

A lot of people disagree with you here. If land-landing were to be easy it would not have been dropped in favor of ocean splash-down.

“Cut the number of astronauts in half and the weight issue goes away and gives you the margins needed to make designing most of the other systems a challenge. ”

Overly simplistic I fear. Show us the numbers you work with.

“Think about it. If you don’t use SDV for heavy lift you could get rid of Michoud, the barges and tugs used to transport the ETs, the SRBs and the infrastructure needed to support them including recovery boats, the crawlers, the VAB, the support for the SME and mothball (or demolish) the two shuttle pads. That is a big saving in overhead when NASA needs every penny. The savings could then be plowed into a new generation HLV when one is actually needed.”

I am afraid you don’t understand then why NASA went with Shuttle “derived” hardware.

So in regards to the ISS it doesn’t look like their is one unifying contract as with the Shuttle and USA.