That said, I did see some snippets, and I thought it was interesting that Bolden basically said that Flexible Path was chosen because of his recommendations to the President. Indicating, at least to me, that the people claiming that the President and the Science Advisor are the ones running to show, are wrong.

Since it’s being done by a Democratic President and Congress, it’s like Nixon going to China so it may work this time. (For the youngsters out there, Nixon was a famous anti-Communist so when he cozied up to the Chinese as a quasi-alliance against the Soviets, you knew it was for real). OTOH, Obama will probably be history before the actual launches that the greens fear will rain nuclear death on them.

I won’t be as confident as you are as there are intrnational treaties to whatever we can put in space. Now of course if we have international partners then… There will still be a lot of resistance from environmentalist groups (I am not saying whether it is good or not just saying). Anyway at least we’re talking future and not past…

1 I am saying Mars in days, and I speak for the President.

2 I dont care who sends up an astronaut to LEO and in 10 years no one will care.

3 I can send a lot of single and double point demostrations up to the iss on the current commercial launch vehicles available without heavy lift.

For me this implies inspace, nuclear propulsion and that President Obama is being consistant with recent moves on nuclear power. Offering the loan guarantees for a couple nuke plants and the increase of material for RTG’s. I would not be at all surprised when the power point presentations start flying around showing inspace vehicle development. Putting the pieces together, so to speak, and showing mars orbit in 40 days with a phoboes landing.

When you terminate a program and you give personel several billions, with a B, to do so you need them to do something, just not sit on their hands. So they’ll make a few more poerpoints…

Ares and Orion started as a 90 day study it only fits that they end as a 90 day study.

I would make two points (sorry this is long) but to start off we are in general agreement.

First. Nothing in life is equal, but opportunity should be. Lockmart has put a lot of its time in Orion and has some institutional knowledge there and from what I have read and been told the project has a lot of “good” things to it. They should be allowed to continue that effort in any sort of resupply/recrew bid and SEE if they can make that system work in a cost competitive environment.

I agree “things” Might move to a reality of a commercial dragon v a commercial orion in either of their guiese (resupply/crew) and that might make an interesting competition (I dont think it works out this way but it might).

The trick is to launch as many ships as possible and see the fly off (sorry for mixing metaphors)…the Navy is trying this with its LCS …

but and this is my main point…

second. If I were advising the Bolden/Garver PR effort…and I am not…what this needs to be is a battle of “the future” vrs the “past”. It is going to have to be done delicatly because there are some geniune massages needed to try and preserve some infrastructure which might be useful, but the fact remains that all the “babble” about “a destination” is just that “babble”.

Even “Call Girl” Vitter acknowledged that “the destination” business is all about a sort of “JFK” fetish. It is about trying to summon some sort of public support for a very “lavish” effort on the part of government to do things which in reality have no benefit for the rest of the nation. Spudis is good at saying he wants the moon for more then just a few NASA astronauts…but he cannot demonstrate how any “goal type” program delivers that.

Every project since Apollo has started off with “the commercial goals” but in the end as the thing bogs down in NASA bureacracy what the end of it becomes is an expensive pyramid…a lot of people on the ground work to keep a few people in orbit doing not much. We spent 100 billion or so on a space station Ronaldus the great sold as costing 8 billion (and that station was far more capable) that was going to do enormous commercial things…and what do we have now…? A bunch of people on orbit doing little more then trying to solve the fire alarms.

The shuttle was going to “open space” and its a billion dollar a pop ride for a bunch of civil servants who look puffy on TV.

The reality of life is that we are never going back to the Moon or on to Mars unless we at some point develop a space industry that makes such a venture “plausible” for some affordable cost…and the folks like Whittington and yes Spudis are arguing for a “program” that always devolves to a single purpose effort.

Bolden is winning this so he probably doesnt have to go that direction…but had I been Charlie (and thats why he is there and I am not) my line to Vitter would have been “Senator President Ronald Reagan proposed the space station with a goal of 1992…how did that work out?” (well I would have come up with nicer language).

Winning has its own virtue…but at some point the choice boils down to (paraphrasing Virginia Postell) the future and its enemies. The “goal” people are its enemies.

Robert G. Oler

Very true. Ares 1 was really holding back Orion’s potential. In many ways NASA made a huge mistake by tieing Orion/ Ares at the hip under the overarching “constellation” program. A better tactic, at least as far Orion is concerned, would have been to manage them as seperate programs and require Orion to be designed in such a way as to be compatible with existing LVs (EELV heavies), and later with future LVs (Ares 1, Falcon 9 heavy). That way when Ares 1 started having problems it could have been scrapped a couple of years ago or more.

Designing the spacecraft and the new LV in parallel was a bad idea from day 1. Imagine how expensive the GPS sats would have been if the DoD had decided that they were “too important/ valuable” to be launched on existing vehicles. Suffice it to say, if Orion wants to survive we’ll have to stop with the make nice talk wrt Ares 1 and throw them under the bus eventually.

“If we walk away from this with an Orion on the path to launching by other means with Ares a distant memory I’ll be thrilled.”

Ditto, sort of. The good news for me personally would be I’d keep my job. The bad news for me personally is I’d keep my job. As much as unemployment would suck, so does my job to be 100% honest. The only advantage is it pays a lot more.

The constellation program as we know it probably will be dead soon. The only purpose for the study is to see if there’s anything worth salvaging. In other words, the carrion birds will soon be picking the corpse clean.

Agreed, 100%. I’m just holding onto hope that when the tombstone is written that Orion can still be passed on to the next of kin, but I guess more as a redundancy argument than anything. Best case scenario we get all half dozen or so spacecraft flying and find or build a market to keep them all afloat (in marketing they call it ‘manufacturing a need’ (see analog TV converters)). In that case we have redundant access to LEO and a Lunar capability when HLV comes online.

Worst case scenario, every other system fails, the HLV never materializes and the largely built and mostly capable Orion is our plan g for LEO on a man-rated ULV stick. Heck, if LockMart’s talk of Orion is accurate and switching boosters isn’t incredibly problematic, Orion may be launching at or around the same date as Dragon.