Their names are listed in the report. The lead was Doug Stanley. Of course, now his architecture studies tout the savings that could accrue from Falcon 9 Heavy and propellant depots:

images.spaceref.com/news/2011/F9Prop.Depot.pdf

I’ve been trying for years to find anyone who actually worked on that study and is willing to admit it. The logic is twisted and irrational. The authors were obviously given a copy of Griffin’s “Planetary Society” paper with its Powerpoint-slide rocket designs and told to conclude that it was right in every respect.

The topper is that apparently Orion will be launched on, yes, a Delta IV, which the ESAS said was impossible, before going on to the ESAS-derived SLS.

I thought it was lobbying from stakeholders that didn’t like the idea of no new rockets contained in the VSE and no new cost plus pork, but instead use already built EELV’s?

This is not called compromises. Compromises make you progress.

It is called status quo. And it goes nowhere.

“But it was sold as a response to VSE. ”

Yes and that is all it was.

“But it did a poor job of marketing itself to the bootprints-means-exploration crowd.”

No I don’t think it was the problem, not really, Columbia is more what the problem was and O’Keefe leaving whom I think was the real connection to the WH and its support. All this I will admit is pure speculation but I saw how it went after O’Keefe left. Down the drain.

“Steidle’s firing by Griffin, who heaved the spiral strategy overboard, was in many respects the beginning of the end of Constellation.”

Griffin had his idea, I speculate again, that if he were to use existing contractors, going so far as offering sole-source contract to ATK and at the very least arguable contract to LMT, then he would garner support. And to some extent we can see how right he was: SLS and MPCV are still languishing today wasting billions with the support of our friendly Congress.

BUT the technical plan was lousy and it all went south. So far south that we can’t even remember where it started. So instead of a 90 day trade study he might have been well advised to run a little real analysis to support trade studies that are generally run with workbooks of the MS kind supported by nice electronic slide of, you guessed it, the MS kind. I’d like to challenge any one to show any analysis that supported ESAS.

The same bs we heard of crewed Sidemount which I am glad at least did not make it! What a pile of horse… thing. A side-mounted capsule with an abort system???? How in hell can they come up with such nonsense and have faith it will work????

Anywho. FWIW.

I’d be surprised if OMB was one of Ed’s driving reasons for resigning. He hired his next to last OMB examiner (Amy Snyder) to come work for SMD, and he (and Huntress) worked closely with her predecessors and their bosses.

Ed always liked to spout off for effect. If he actually made that statement, I doubt it reflected his true reasoning. Ed was (still is?) a single parent, and I imagine his decision had a lot more to do with the age of his boy and how much time he was making available to him.

And space programs inherently take more years than a single administration, so multi-year appropriations would help.

On the other hand, simply shifting more power from the White House to Congress would hurt rather than help. Congress tends to arrive at compromises where if some on the committees want a particular project and some don’t, then they fund that project at half of the budget it needs to succeed (then cancel it later for lack of progress). In general, compromise in Congress should be encouraged, but some things don’t scale, such that a half-funded project produces nothing.

is to revert NASA to NACA and be done with it for some years to come. Then we’ll see.

True. It wasn’t an “answer” to VSE. But it was sold as a response to VSE. ESAS was, to be clearer, the plan that was generated in response to VSE. Took some spinning, but when everyone was sufficiently dizzy from the spinning, they looked the other way. I agree completely that the Steidle “spiral” approach was most consistent with the flexible path construct, and was fiscally flexible enough to render it highly sustainable. But it did a poor job of marketing itself to the bootprints-means-exploration crowd. Steidle’s firing by Griffin, who heaved the spiral strategy overboard, was in many respects the beginning of the end of Constellation.

End the congressional mandates ( space pork ) on both sides of the isle.
Stop using commercial space as the scapegoat for NASA’s failed policies.
Set a realistic goal for human exploration within our solar system and beyond.