Yep, you’re right. Moreover his statement contradicts all he’s been saying over the years. Very bizarre.

“Mr. Rutan, a veteran aerospace designer and entrepreneur, in a letter addressed to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, says he is “fearful that the commercial guys will fail” to deliver on the promises to get beyond low earth orbit, and that the policy risks setting back the nation’s space program. ”

So, I think there is a misunderstanding here. Burt doesn’t attack the plans to get to LEO by commercial transportation. It’s about getting beyond LEO. As far as I know the current NASA plan is not saying that beyond LEO operations will also done with commercial transportation.

Constellation however, is not the answer. The post shuttle gap vector began years ago, and unless shuttle is extended by three years or so, at great cost, it will be a tough hiatus. I hope NASA will have sense to get with the new plan, discover its remarkable possibilities, and work synergistically with the commercial developers.

In three years or so we should see at least one of the several initiatives setting some real flight test dates, hopefully full up. Orion lite, Dragon, Dreamchaser and Cygnus development teams, are you feeling the pressure now?

I agree with Burt. Obama’s plan is a big mistake. Well its a big mistake if you want to see American’s in space over the next 30 years.

“It would be even more exciting if the plan was to actually do missions with this new technology.”

Why does space always have to defined as space program, space is a place not a program. It is also not a war zone where we need missions. Do people that ride a commercial flight go on a “mission”?

If a NASA astronaut takes a commercial flight to the ISS, is it a mission?

Why is it so hard for you to understand that the “mission” is the inner solar system. The “program” is to develope the technology we need to both, push into the commercial sector to advance America’s economy, create new global markets we can capture, provide high tech jobs for the 21st, and allow NASA to move to the utilization of commercial transport for access to LEO, commercial infracture temporaty habitat facilities, in space refueling, with space based, reusable vehicle that can travel Point 2 Point anywhere in the inner solar system.

Why is that so bad, and funding constellation and billions of hardware tossed into the drink with each flight and which will put 4-8 americans in space per year, from our high of about 60 per year with the shuttle a better solution?

“I just find it unfortunate that there’s no outline of initial astronaut missions beyond LEO – not the dates for getting to those destinations, but the dates for starting the work on those easy (relatively speaking) missions that probably need to happen before any of the harder ones and that I suspect don’t require lots of robotic precursors or technology demonstrations.”

Don’t you think that we first need to understand what kind of vehicles will be available? Unless you include the design of an entirely nwe architecture how do you plan to design the missions?

The big difference is the type of propellant. The Russian systems use noncryogenic propellants and that makes a lot of difference. You can’t use those systems with cryogenic propellants since the diaphragms and bellows can’t handle the low temperature. Cryogenic propellants also boil off very quickly without excellent passive and/or active cooling. Noncryogenic propellants don’t boil off at all.

Still, it doesn’t really matter because noncryogenic propellants make for excellent lander propellants, and off-loading the propellant from a lander is enough to get it to L1/L2 with current launch vehicles and current upper stages for as EDS. I’ve described the details in an earlier post in this thread, and it would be a wash cost-wise. If we wanted to do exploration soon, we could do it this way, no HLV needed. We could even take immediate advantage of cryogenic propellant transfer once it became available: we could use refuelable upper stages as EDSs and, once refueled at L1/L2, as crasher / uncrasher stages for the lander, reducing both cost/kg and IMLEO.

Of course, it is more likely that we won’t do exploration anytime soon. In that case, cryogenic propellant transfer and storage would likely be ready by the time we wanted to go beyond LEO. In that case there would be no reason to stay away from cryogenics.

Major Tom wrote regarding Donald Robertson’s post:

“‘in-space propellant transfer and storage, inflatable modules, and autonomous rendezvous and docking.’

This has already been demonstrated in day-to-day operations on Mir and the ISS.”

Not true. Long-term, in-space _cryogenic_ propellant storage and transfer, which is what we’re talking about for human exploration missions, has never been demonstrated. Human-scale inflatables have never been demostrated, certainly not with modifications for exploration missions. Russian semi-autonomous rendezous and docking systems for human space systems have obviously been demonstrated, but they have a history of collisions and there is no domestic source.

(I think it’s the definition of “long term” that is the sticking point for propellant storage and transfer. Progress ships stay docked for up to 6 months at the ISS. They have also served this function, dating back to Salute 6, for over 20 years so I think there is a substantial knowledge base for propellant storage.
Russian (and nor European)semi-autonomous rendezvous and docking has been around for almost 20 years and has not had a collision in a decade. Again, a large knowledge base exists.
Bigalow is well on the way tword the creation and utilization inflatable habitation modules. This is just the type of thing should be supporting in the commercial sector not competing agenst with there own research.)

“Dust off the F1 diagrams, use the RD-180, or best, use SpaceX multiple engines.”

After Griffin learned that an air-started SSME was a non-starter, the Ares program dusted off the J-2 but found that the higher thrust required of the J-2X necessitated a complete redesign of hundreds of piece parts.

If you’re talking about producing a domestic version of the RD-180, like many Russian rocket engines, there are metallurgical processes involved in RD-180 production that currenly do not exist in U.S. industry.

Given that every rocket engine carries some probability of catastrophic failure, there are limits to how many you’d want to gang together before taking on unreasonable vehicle or mission risk.

You statement assumes or implies that these are trivial technical issues. They are not.

(Pratt & Whitney has a contract to produce the RD-180. Although they haven’t produced one yet they are tooling up to do so.
Dusting off the designs or the F-1 engine would not require major re-engineering to increase thrust because it would already far surpass the minimum thrust NASA would be looking for. Plus they have been demonstrated safe and reliable in clusters of up to 5.)

“Complete waste of money unless they are demonstrating mining oxygen from the regolith or some other useful technology.”

You really need to read the actual budget document before making statements like this. That 2011 lunar landing mission specifically includes “investigations for validating the availability of resources for extraction”.

( There is a big difference between validating the availability of resources, which LCROSS has done, and demonstrating a capability like mining.)
read their full descriptions in the budget document.

FWIW…