LOL and that is why we are here today. because people like you don’t know the value of a dollar.

“For example, in a year of planned Constellation lunar operations in the mid-2020s, there would be three Shuttle-derived vehicle launches for
each mission to the Moon, which would deliver a mass comparable to that of two Ares V-class launchers.”

The Sidemount requires only only two launches per mission: one launch of the Orion to lunar orbit and another launch of an Altair vehicle to lunar orbit weighing up to nearly 48 tonnes. Even the Altair vehicle for the Ares V is designed to weigh only 45 tonnes. The committee must have read Shannon’s first report on the Sidemount where only 39 tonnes of net payload could be transported into low lunar orbit but did not read the subsequent reports that showed that an EDS stage could transport up to 47 tonnes of net payload into low lunar orbit.

So you only need two launches– per mission– not three! A huge and critical misrepresentation of the Sidemount and DIRECT concepts, IMO.

But to quote again from the Augustine report:

“With two crew and two cargo missions per year, this would require eight to ten launches of the Shuttle-derived launcher, each with three or four SSMEs or derivatives, for a total of 24 to 40 of the Shuttle engines being used, with a resulting high recurring cost.”

Two SD-HLV crew launches (Orion plus Altair) plus two cargo missions would require only 6 launches per year. And so what if a lot of SSME are thrown away. Mass production of the SSME should gradually bring down the cost of the SSMEs over the years which should gradually reduce the cost of the SD-HLV launches. Its called economies of mass production.

And I see nothing wrong with launching 10 to 12 SD-HLV vehicles a year to build a continuously growing lunar settlement plus maybe one lunar sortie mission per year and one mission to the ISS per year. If we’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars building this new space transportation system, we might as well utilize it to its fullest extent once its built!

As of Charles Bolden. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place! He must be careful not to upset too many people within NASA’s ranks AND inside the WH and yet he will have to carry forward the final decision. Of course we’re all proud of the rocket, as a symbol. And it looks like he is taking the right approach about Ares I-X but I fear “too little too late”. Yes it is a test and yes we must make the most of it. It would have been nice a real LAS was on top and we would fire it. That would have been extremly high added value. Oh well. You do what you can with what you have.

Thanks for the great coverage!

Nelson