Then it is the post CEV/Orion vehicle, not the pre Phase 2 vehicle. And I am almost certain it won’t go because of legal issues. When a vehicle has essentially been developed on NASA/government contract (be it CEV, OSP, or anything) I am sure you cannot use the design for another competitive bid. Especially LMT who got “billions” to develop the CEV. How fair would that be to say SpaceX or the others who developed their vehicles on their own cash?

Anything is possible especially in politics but if I were the “other” space firms I’d make sure to prime my lawyers…

Oh well…

I think someone may be thinking of the LockMart/Bigelow Crew Transport Vehicle (CTV) or “Orion-lite” described here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32418057/ns/technology_and_science-space/

FWIW…

Nope it was not. It was a pretty big lifting body:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/cevkheed.htm
And it probably would have failed considering the size of the thing anyway. Totally unrealistic.

“But whatever, who cares.”

Well, I do. Somehow. Even though there is a lot of passionate bickering I don’t like to see people who like things I like, enough to work on them, not post on blogs, have tough times.

But who around you spoke up to management, inside or outside NASA?

I don’t think I’m in “denial”, if anything you’re preaching to the choir. I know as well as anyone, maybe better than some – insider knowledge and all that – how screwed up constellation is. Although most of the screwiness is due to Ares 1 as opposed to Orion. LM’s original proposal, pre-ESAS, was for a smaller, simpler capsule that could be launched atop an EELV. That definitely would have been better than the Ares based architecture.

But, to paraphrase Luke Skywalker, “It’s not that I like the [constellation program], I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.” Who knows, maybe in the long run things will work out for the better. It would certainly be nice to have a job that’s not at risk of disappearing with the next federal budget, which is what a private space industry would provide. But in the short term, there’s the very real possibility that myself and a lot of others will soon be out of our jobs. But whatever, who cares.

“I’m just a little worried about the prospect of being unemployed, that’s all.”

Believe me I know how you feel at least in part. All I was trying to tell you is to not get lost in denial. It won’t help. The program started to stink and to sink right after ESAS and the whole Ares/”Apollo” decision. Decisions were made without regard to the CEV Phase 1 proposals by the contractors (speculation by me but I don’t remember any such architecture proposed save for the “Apollo” capsule). At the CEV level they chose a crazy humongous capsule whose OML is different enough from Apollo to warrant a lot of analyses and tests. Not to mention the re-invention of AVCOAT. Now bear in mind the idea was to use existing knowledge and save money and so to me that was the beginning of the end budgetwise. And there were known issues about the SRB really early in the program about its lofting capabilities which were obviously ignored.

Again denial won’t help. This WH may put a stake through the heart of the program but it so deserves it. Too bad.

Make sure your resume is up to date and hope for a COTS-D like program to open. If it does not then you may blame the current Exploration/Operations leadership at NASA (I did not say the current Admin) and your favorite Congress people.

Good luck to you.

I didn’t mean to sound like I was blaming the entire fiasco on Obama. There’s plenty of blame to go around, you’re right. Starting with Bush, Grifffin, and congresses controlled by both political parties. And I doubt things would be any better if McCain had won either. I’m just a little worried about the prospect of being unemployed, that’s all. The last time I was unemployed it took over a year for me to find a new job in the aerospace industry. In the meantime I had to make do with whatever I could find.

It sucked then, but back then I had a car that was fully paid off, I was single, and didn’t have a house payment to worry about, only rent. Now I have a mortgage payment, a car payment, a lot of other bills to worry about, and to top it all off my wife is also an engineer and works on, you guessed it, the Orion project. Although she works for LM directly, while I’m only a contractor, so she’ll hopefully be placed somewhere else within LM. But if not, that’s pretty much the cherry on top of the crap sunday that will be my life should Orion get cancelled. Oh well.

Then I would hope that COTS-D or CCDev or anything lik them come about. So many at the highest levels of NASA and Congress have fought it that it may never come to be. Pretty sad huh? You lay the blame with the current WH but and since you seem to be part of Constelltion I sure hope you know better than that. Try and reflect what you did for the past 5 years (if you were at the inception of the CEV), try and connect the dots and tell us it was not doomed in the first place. Actually as soon as ESAS and the Ares/CEV choices were imposed by NASA. You’re blaming the wrong person(s) and it won’t help you. Sorry.

Oh well, I’ve always believed that to tell what a politician will do you have to go back to what they said/ did prior to the general election, because anything a politician says during the GE is just lies and half truths to get votes (yes, I am that cynical). In november ’07 BO said he wanted to cancel constellation. It’s probable that the Augustine committee and now any new NASA study will give him the ammunition to do just that.

At any rate, I think I’ll be updateing my resume on careerbuilder, monster, etc just in case…

Obama, especially in the wake of Massachusetts, seems to have lost control of his own Presidency. In space policy (and much else) this means chaos…

that assumes BHO ever had control of his administration.

The hardest thing a new person in charge has to do is take command.

Taking the oath of office is the easy part…the hard part is starting to bend the folks at the next level below you to your will..while not breaking their spirit… And doing that assumes as a foundation something which I am not for sure Obama ever had…a sense of what he wanted his presidency to be.

There is a great line by the actor who played The POTUS in “The Sum of All Fears”…they are on KNEECAP and things are falling apart, he has lost his good friend the DCI…and is sort of not doing all that well…the best acted line he has is that as he looks off in the distance (even while sitting around the table) and muses “I wanted to be President all my adult life, I spent decades figuring out what I would do as President and this is what it comes down to”.

All said while oblivious to the central fact…he got to that position on this issue, because he didnt have a plan to deal with the line expressed by his DCI at the very start of the movie “It isnt the person with 1000 nukes I worry about, it is the person with one”.

I am becoming of the opinion that things I expressed on TH and other blogs (including some left of center) during the campaign is accurate…BHO had no idea of what he wanted to do as POTUS (neither really did McCain…the only person in the race I think who did was HRC).

I do not think he (BHO) ever cared (as neither did JSM or HRC) about space policy and I dont think, other then the mechanism of new effort) which is a little choatic that things are all that much in chaos.

The “program of record” is going nowhere…it was going nowhere during Bush’s term (as I told you it would)…something else was inevitable.

Sadly for the current person in TWW I dont think that he will take advantage of the changes which seem to be occurring in human spaceflight…ie announcing that we are restarting human spaceflight in The Republic in a different mode, one that creates real jobs, jobs of the private sector…not continuing mindless human exploration.

OH sorry I forgot you like those kinds of programs

Robert G. Oler