No, it is not. If that were true, it wouldn’t be flexible. Just because Obama says “been there, done that” in 2010 doesn’t mean that we can’t go to the moon once we get the infrastructure in place to go beyond LEO in general.

“What happens is the Moon is totally excluded in Flexible Path.”

You keep missing the point here. We already know how to land, move around on, and return from the Moon. Everything else we want to do there is just expanding on that. The new plan calls for doing more 1st time exploration, such as learning how to live in places not protected by the Earth’s magnetic fields. This is the hard stuff that only NASA can do.

Flexible path creates the systems and technologies that allows any public/private group to go places NASA has already been, including the Moon. The next people on the Moon are going to be there for exploitation, not just pure exploration. NASA does exploration, and other groups, either with or without government support, do exploitation. How many industries do you want NASA competing with private enterprise?

and $0.6B” should be “and $0.6B” from Shuttle slip contingency”

(If Shuttle does have a small slip, then you’d have fewer of those $100M(?) months of infrastructure costs to deal with anyway, so the impact wouldn’t be all that great).

Not that I’m aware of. Of course, he’s pretty old news by now, and was never a Constellation fan to begin with.

“Constellation is a fantastic space project precisely because it FINALLY GETS US SOMEPLACE.” You must have been very frustrated from 1972 until 2005. Now that someone proposes something that returns to someplace we’ve already been, you don’t care how much money it takes to go there. Are we supposed to pay for your Moon fantasies?

“Look, guys: any heavy-lift rocket adequate for the Moon, will be plenty adequate for a NEO mission as well. Ares 5 should be the heavy-lift rocket we should all be rooting for!” An HLLV is not necessary for any of these destinations. What many of us don’t like about Constellation, is that Griffin unilaterally decided what the architecture would be. There were no RFQ’s, no design competitions, and he didn’t ask the two most capable aerospace companies in the world (Boeing & Lockheed-Martin) what they do. Without competition, you don’t get a wide variety of ideas, and more importantly, you don’t find out where the costs should be. Ares V is a typical sole-source cost-plus contract, and if you look at it from a $/lb standpoint, will be the most expensive launcher in history. There are alternative ways to get to the Moon (in-orbit assembly), and they can happen quicker and at a far lower cost. What’s the matter with that?

“The Altair-class lander can demonstrate the unmanned, one-way soft-landings of heavy cargo & base modules onto the Moon, in its automated variant form.” Altair is a paper vehicle, and no one really knows what it will finally look like. However, from the concept published, it is 1) non-reusable, 2) extremely difficult to enter or exit (have to climb a 20ft ladder), and 3) is not designed for cargo because of how high up the cargo is loaded. If you want to see the next generation of vehicles after “Apollo on Steroids”, look at the Lockheed-Martin ACES-41 proposal. ACES-41 can land crew & cargo on the moon using the current generation of landers, which means it is extremely less costly than Constellation. Lack of competition means higher costs, and unimaginative designs.

“leaving in lunar orbit of a temporarily unmanned Orion CEV craft…adds brand new dimension to other-planet mission capability…”. Piffle! Robotic operation of spacecraft has been demonstrated for decades, and leaving Orion on automatic is no big deal. The bigger questions are 1) why live in the small Orion for long periods of time, and 2) why would you want to haul a couple of tons of heat-shield weight around when you don’t need it? We already have equipment in space that will sustain astronauts for long periods of time (ISS modules), why not expand on that proven equipment. You don’t take your car with you when you fly to Hawaii, do you? Look for alternatives.

Overall, Constellation lovers lack imagination. They think the Moon must be conquered today – no matter what the cost! Do we need to bring in the Tea Party to enforce some fiscal discipline?

In theory, it gets a tiny number of astronauts back to the moon, two decades from now, at horrific cost. If you want to go someplace, there are much faster and cheaper ways to do it, with many more participants.

I support Constellation because it is the only credible proposal which gets us out of LEO anytime soon. Obama’s Plan puts NASA on a weak, flimsy, and even-more-easily cancellable course.

If you believe that, you don’t understand anything at all about Constellation. It was not only not the only credible proposal (there are many of those) but it was an incredible one if you want to go anywhere any time soon. And as for cancellibility, it would seem that this was a strong trait of Constellation, not other plans, based on the available evidence.

I’d characterize the other camp to be the Shuttle/Shuttle-derived workforce camp. These are the people who lose jobs or constituents’ jobs with the current plan, including the decision to phase out the Shuttle that Bush made and Obama confirmed.

We would probably be best off with some combination of propellant depots, docking, assembly, and modest/affordable HLV with infrastructure shared with rockets used for other purposes, not a Shuttle-derived HLV. However, a compromise can involve a less-than-optimal decision to allow other good elements to happen. So, what could help bring the Shuttle-derived workforce and its supporters on board without wiping out the promising new initiatives in NASA’s budget?

Nelson has talked about adding a Shuttle flight or 2. A compromise that does something like that, assuming it can reasonably be done with available component (eg: the last rescue mission hardware, using a small Shuttle crew and ISS/Soyuz in case of problems), could be the most affordable compromise for this workforce. On the other hand, it’s bad because it gambles with astronauts’ lives on the Shuttle. It also doesn’t offer the Shuttle workforce anything permanent.

Shannon’s block I sidemount claims the cheapest HLV development cost I’ve seen due to high synergy with existing Shuttle hardware. Let’s suppose it’s really $3B (a bit more than Shannon claimed). It’s cargo-only. Block II would lift more, but would cost more to develop. Postpone block II thoughts for later years. Let’s assume sidemount is too dangerous for crew. This would be a cargo-only rocket. The cargo need not be defined here – let’s just suppose the sidemount is used to launch robotic precursors, or technology demonstrations, or large ISS components, or science missions … it doesn’t matter.

Usually the sidemount proposal goes out of control because it’s tied to a Shuttle extension. There is synergy between Shuttle extension and sidemount because 1 maintains infrastructure used by the other. However, the cost of Shuttle extension (at least $170M/month) completely blows this paired option out of the water. It would be so expensive it would wipe out most of the new NASA initiatives.

So … for a compromise that might be affordable … don’t include Shuttle extension. Just develop the block I sidemount. Fund cargo for it from existing NASA lines. Don’t give the cargo launch users lots of money for sidemount missions. Just make lots of mass and volume available to them, but keep their budget the same as if they were using an EELV. Once Shuttle itself stops flying, just maintain the Shuttle infrastructure enough to later support the sidemount – which I assume is considerably less than what would be needed to support Shuttle extension. I don’t know what these infrastructure cost would be, but it would surely save a decent amount of Shuttle workforce jobs. Would it be affordable? I don’t know. Suppose bare-bones infrastructure and workforce maintenance with no flights at all, just whatever is needed to enable later sidemount cargo operations, is $100M/month (everything depends on what this figure really is). From 2011-2015 that’s $6B. $6B + $3B block I development is $9B.

In the new budget, if you take $3.1B from HLV/propulsion R&D (any such R&D now moves to the “Space Technology” line), $1B from Constellation Transition, $1.9B from KSC Modernization, and $0.6B, you’re left with a $2.4B shortfall. You can get away with purchasing a few fewer EELV or similar rides since your sticking robotic precursors or something like that on the sidemount, so the $2.4B shortfall may only cause about $2B in actual pain to the new initiatives. That would not be pleasant, but it could be a viable compromise that brings the Shuttle-derived workforce on board.

This particular plan and figures might not close, but hopefully my point gets through. Excluding the most minimal Shuttle extension/flight addition, the compromises the Shuttle workforce supporters have put forward have been either far too expensive (i.e. DIRECT with Orion, Constellation revived, etc) or purely wasteful (i.e. Ares I tests forever). They need to discover and then support a compromise that is affordable and useful. If they can do that, I’d expect serious consideration by the Administration.