The same is true of SLS and Orion now. There’s no money for mission hardware, the Block II phase of the project has been abandoned to keep the near-worthless first phase barely going and schedules continue to slip. The whole program is just a scam to squeeze a few more billion into the pockets of the Marshall Space Flight Center, Boeing and LockMart before the thing grinds to its inevitable halt. NASA hasn’t finished anything it has started since Shuttle and ISS. SLS is not going to be an exception.

I totally disagree. The engineering difficulties were fully overcome-able. Again, if Ares 1, had proved to be a weak chain link——and this was NOT a certainty, as some degree of patience with working thru the issues, would’ve made a difference——-then the Orion’s launcher could have been changed to another such smaller rocket.

Building a lander for reaching the Moon’s surface, would’ve taken another healthy dose of that patience thing, but would ultimately have put together a viable vehicle, which could have exceeded the capabilities of the old Apollo LEM. The mission elements could’ve been constucted in phases. First to come would’ve been the Orion capsule & its accompanying launch rocket, whether an Ares 1 or something else.

The giant heavy-lift rocket, the Ares 5, was to have been built concurrently with the designated lunar payloads it was to launch up: the Altair L-SAM, & the earth escape stage. If that portion of the plan would have had to wait somewhat longer to’ve come into service; say after 2020, then so it would’ve been———–NASA still would accomplish reaching the Moon, in this century, sometime in the 2020’s.

Of course the ISS and any further space telescopes would’ve been sacrificed in this process. But that would’ve been fine: far more superior telescopes could eventually be built on the Moon’s far-side, and we’d have exchanged a zero gravity training environment for a one-sixth-of-earth-gravity one. Furthermore, do you really think that the future project for a manned expedition to Mars will turn out to be any easier to do than Constellation would have been??

1. It was a James Webb Space Telescope-class budget buster and its budget was already an order of magnitude greater than the JWST. The JWST itself has eaten NASA out of house and home by not being cancelled years ago. Constellation was going to take NASA entirely down if it had continued. First, it would have consumed every other NASA program, then it would have starved when there was nothing more to feed it. The only alternative histories in which Constellation was completed and launched anything also have unicorns and flying cars in them.

2. It was a James Webb Space Telescope-class schedule buster. At the time it was cancelled, it was slipping its schedule by more than a year per year.

You need to acknowledge fiscal reality. Constellation had bad genes. It was never going to live long enough to grow up.

In any event, this “Golden Spike” type of approach, to the flight plan, with a two spacecraft LLO rendezvous, might become the fallback plan, if we can’t get a more powerful Heavy-Lift rocket. So consider the ramifications of Project Constellation’s cancellation, and our lack of an Ares 5. Not to mention all of the valuable years, perhaps a full decade worth of time, that NASA will’ve wasted building a weaker Heavy-Lift rocket simply to go meteor-rock chasing in high lunar orbit. Who knows when a Lunar-friendly administration will finally come in? Whatever “Golden Spike” type of small-sized lander that we eventually build, will have to serve the double eventual duty of a cargo-only version lander———-which minus the ascent engine need, would be used for an eventual base-module/base equipment lander vehicle.

If ISS died, then the whole rationale for keeping Shuttle flying would have died with it. So it would have had to be Constellation. In other words, Constellation was a dead man walking pretty much no matter whatever else was decided. The “reckless and pompous men” who foisted the unaffordable Constellation on us in the first place are the ones who also doomed it. You need to get your nose out of NASA’s backside and look around at the real world for a change.

Sure, the Space Shuttle could never’ve gone on for much longer than this decade. But think about it: even stretching out the STS manifest to five years longer than it was, say till 2016, would’ve avoided the long & exasperating dependency on Russia in sending our crews to the ISS. Resupply to it, could’ve continued to’ve been as frequently as was needed for doing the crew turn-arounds. [Either every six months, or anything between that and one full year.]

Indeed this continuation could’ve shortened or even eliminated the United States’s human spaceflight gap, until a new capsule vehicle came into service. The associated rocketry for the designated new crew vehicle, was clearly going to be Shuttle-derived, hence, keeping the industrial production lines open would’ve made a beneficial difference, in the construction of what came next.

NASA is now running around the farm, like a cadre of decapitated chickens, without a clue as to what exactly is going to happen! I’m NO Space Shuttle enthusiast, mind you! But extending the Shuttle would have been the smart & tactical thing to do, under the execrable conditions that the American space program found itself in, after Project Constellation had been exterminated by the reckless & pompous men in power, in 2010!

Of course it was NASA’s idea. It was an idea that was created to serve the need expressed by the Administration. The idea was an act of implementation. This Administration, nor Congress for that matter, has given NASA a real national need that they are now charged with fulfilling.

As to Constellation, that’s exactly right that there was no strategy that made sense. The Administration and Congress looked at Constellation carefully, and the budget it required, and said “Uh, why?” There was no reason why.

The Ares 5 is dead because it was spending even more and taking even longer than SLS. You need to accept the fact that NASA heavy-lifters are a disastrous and unsustainable dead end. You can go to the Moon or you can keep pouring billions into NASA-designed BFR’s – you can’t do both.