That’s true in general, but major federal investments can’t have contractors formalizing international agreements to achieve national goals. When Boeing builds a commercial aircraft, it isn’t using taxpayer money to achieve national goals. So NASA (as the smart customer) and the State Department have important roles to play. Lockheed and Boeing aren’t gonna be signing any space MOUs with ESA, and there will always be ITAR issues to resolve. Contractors can propose implementation plans, but they’ll need NASA and DoS to formalize them.

Bottom line was that VSE made Griffin need to pretend that international participation was being encouraged. So he did that, in a hand-wavey sort of way. But he drew a line around the transportation hardware and told internationals not to cross it.

Now, as to being given sets of requirements, the issue is whether this is about a top-down or bottoms-up design strategy. That’s really a topic for discussion about commercialization. It’s true that NASA should hold up a wad of cash, and say, “get us safely to the Moon!” But that’s not the historic perspective of NASA, who feel that they know more about vehicle design than the major aerospace contractors.

He should have left alone the way it started under O’Keefe. Contractors were better suited to determine what to do given the set of requirements. International, domestic or otherwise. When Boeing builds a new commercial aircraft they know very well how to use the different synergies domestic/international economic/political to reap the most of their endeavors. NASA cannot. NASA is even banned from talking to China off some moronic excuse from a senile Congressman. NASA has no business designing, integrating and somehow producing any vehicle, except for X-vehicles which I believe took a nose dive under Griffin.

Anyway 90 day or 60 day gives an idea of the poor management of the whole thing.

I am sure Griffin also believed he’d have Sen. Shelby in his pocket as a supporter. I guess he did but at what cost to the whole program?

There is this program called POST that can tell you if your rocket will perform properly, and your reentering capsule as well. There are other “engineering” tools that can do the same for aerodynamics and aerothermal performances. When used properly they tell you what will work or not work. There is actually more than that. And guess what! They are NASA tools. So I don’t know what they used for ESAS, maybe Excel, but it did not work all that well.

Note that the same clowns brought us the Sidemount monstrosity with total disregard of “common sense” abort scenarios that most likely would have killed the crew. Well at least I think Griffin was not part of it.

Anyway. Off topic I know. But it’s nice to vent on occasion if I may say so myself.

Lots of equipment is built by internationals for ISS assuming components that don’t yet exist, so I’d assume that Mike wanted to forge international participation with Constellation on that ISS management model. Constellation “existed” in the minds of senior NASA officials. Um, just like SLS now exists in the minds of NASA officials. Is there any question why NASA is having a hard time organizing prospective users for SLS?

Now, in his defense, I guess Mike was just trying to develop a space transportation system that wasn’t dependent on international contributions, which are tough to manage and coordinate. If international partners cratered on producing surface architecture, it wouldn’t keep us from going back to the Moon to leave more footprints. In fact, while those contributions are hard to manage, it’s well understood that the international agreements that underpin them are extremely hard to cancel. So Constellation as a space transportation enterprise might well have survived if it was a real international partnership.

Now maybe I did not express myself well. In my mind “programmed” meant “budgeted” in some form. How do you convince partners, international or any kind, to start working on lunar habitats or even robots when the main transportation system does not even exist?

On the other hand, I guess, since someone at ESA is supposed to build 1 (one!) SM for Orion we might call it now a multinational effort.

But in any case. This is a lot of nonsense. This is not how you ready an effort for the next 20 years of HSF, let alone an international one!

I think that when Griffin defends Constellation as being an international endeavor, he’s referring to those greater goals. To the extent that Constellation was created to serve VSE (which yes, it did not follow exactly, though Mike swore that it would), VSE clearly called for promoting international and commercial participation to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.

Go ask LMT about their plans with EADS for example…

So nope. Not international whatsoever.