This statement is gibberish. Go research what it takes to develop and implement a business plan.

“And yes, that makes ULA a NASA contractor, ….”

ULA is not, and never has been a NASA contractor. ULA is a DoD contractor. If NASA needs a EELV, they work through DoD.

“… ULA is still a private commercial company that is free to pick up more commercial flights …”

ULA does not sell commercial flights. ULA is a DoD contractor. If a commercial company (Intelsat, SES, etc.) wants/needs an EELV, they work through either the Boeing Commercial Launch Service provider or the Lockheed Commercial Launch Service provider. Boeing CLS and LM CLS are competitors in the commercial launch business.

Commercial EELV launches are very rare. DoD fully manifests the EELV’s and wedging in a commercial EELV is difficult. EELV’s are also expensive relative to other launch vehicles because of the reliability demands required by DoD. DoD cannot afford to have its launch capability cutoff because of dumb mistakes that lead to launch failures (SpaceX). That is why they carry two independent LV production lines (even if both are managed by a single company) so that if a systemic error arises in one vehicle design (bad parts, bad proceedures, etc.), the other is available to continue to meet DoD needs while the problem is worked.

Given your ignorance about these topics, it’s hard to take anything else you write seriously.

I guess you should, Brad. With sentences like “It’s an explanation why Bolden has decided to retrench NASA for the next 10-20 years away from deep space ops and into pure R&D.” it looks like you’re only blaming Bolden.

And how. The ability of astronaut fans to set themselves up for disappointment has never ceased to amaze me.

La di da…

I want a rocket/capsule too but wIthout a lander or R&D you can have neither the moon nor flexible path.

I would argue that it’s much easier to line up pols to fund big shiny rockets than it is to get them to fund basic R&D to make use of the rocket. These opportunities are rare. It’s not the status quo move that your average WH would come up with and it might well pan out.

NASA hasn’t conducted deep space human operations for 40-odd years. An organization can’t retrench from something it isn’t doing.

And going forward, nothing has changed. The agency never had a credible budget and program plan for deep space human operations any earlier than the 2030s — more than 20 years away — anyway.

FWIW…

It’s really sad to see how often defender’s of the Obama plan resort to a knee jerk attack on a strawman, as the default defense of the Obama plan. At one point I thought that I had to append to every post I made the fact that I don’t support Constellation, in order to head off the strawman reaction. But that didn’t make any difference, so why bother.

Sure Brad, as if the current program by Griffin would be getting us into deep space ops any time soon….

Thank you very much for the link to the late breaking Bolden statement. I thought this part of his statement really puts the new plan into perspective,”We in the NASA family know all too well the difficulty of the things we do, and we now want to go to Mars and other deep-space destinations. We all know that we can’t get there with the technology and knowledge base that we have today, and that is why we must aggressively embark on a robust program of research and development.”

This reinforces for me some other things I’ve heard Bolden say, and clarifies the current Bolden/Obama plan for NASA. It’s an explanation why Bolden has decided to retrench NASA for the next 10-20 years away from deep space ops and into pure R&D. I think it’s a needlessly conservative policy, but at least it explains a lot.

Or to put it in Administrator Bolden’s terms, the VSE was a hallucination. “A vision without resources is a hallucination.”