I view boning Carmen Electra all weekend in a luxury Vegas penthouse as a desirable goal. But I also realize it’s one that’s unlikely ever to come to pass because Carmen, doggone it, just isn’t motivated to pursue the project. I judge ULA’s current interest and motivation in pursuing flyback booster technology to be very Carmenesque.

I will add that I prefer to see engineers employed rather than accountants and lobbyists.

Hey, so do I and I’m none of the above.

Consider. There were 135 missions over 30 years during the Shuttle era. That’s an average of 4.5 missions a year. To fly 4.5 missions takes 9 SRB’s containing 36 fuel grain segments, 4 in each SRB. In the SLS era, in contrast, NASA isn’t planning to fly oftener than every other year – if that. One SLS mission every other year means only one 5-segment SRB per year. That;s an 86% drop in annual production. Yet ATK – and now Orbital – will be on the hook to keep the giant mixing and casting machines for these giant fuel grain segments maintained and operational while getting a lot less revenue for their trouble.

Orbit could< decide this makes no economic sense, close down the SRB facility, kill SLS at a stroke and downsize their solids business to a scale that is sustainable given steady or even growing demand for ATK’s numerous smaller solid motor products. Not saying Orbital will do this, but they could.

I still think we should leverage our existing investments better – for example, why not get past Earth’s gravity-well by launching a Mars-ship directly from the ISS, and a separate, slower, but better fueled shuttle to get to the ISS first?

I like the basic plan only replace the ISS by a gateway spacestation. If Bigelow’s dreams come true NASA should be able to control one for 1-2 billion dollars. (He will not know the real cost until a manned spacestation has been operating for a year.)

The ISS is a joint US-Russian operation so Putin can veto any launches from it. Space Race 2 advantage USA is unlikely to get much help from the Russian Government.

“The reason why ATK could block things has to do with the nature of large, segmented solids.”

I am very certain you are mistaken there as to how ATK operated politically.

What will happen now that Orbital has taken over ATK’s solids division is beyond my abilities to forecast.

“In order for the cost of spaceflight to decrease it must become less labor intensive hence why employing engineers is contrary to that goal.”

I’ll have to disagree with you on that as well. One actually has to engineer low cost launch systems, and that requires engineers.

Unlike Tea Party in Space, you seem to have trouble with basic concepts of the movement.

The Orion contract was let in 2006. Despite getting on average twice the annual budget of Commercial Crew, the Orion program aims to have its first flight in 2021, a period of 15 years.

Commercial Crew: Better, faster, and cheaper.

You just throw around the term in your organisation’s name to mislead people. My mistake.

The reason why ATK could block things has to do with the nature of large, segmented solids. They are labor intensive. The production, transportation and stacking them employed more people than a liquid design and this is why the current EELV don’t use them. A private company that would be aimed at profit would have enough control over the design to get rid of labor intensive systems in a latter upgrade cycle. NASA could not.

The ELV continued development. Atlas II,III,V; Titian IV; Delta II,III,IV and many others like Pegasus were developed post Challenger. ATK did not block these vehicles because they were privately owned and Congress had less say in them.
ULA isn’t developing flyback at the moment because they want Congress to pay for it. They have done some work but Space X has put in far more effort.
In order for the cost of spaceflight to decrease it must become less labor intensive hence why employing engineers is contrary to that goal.

“Because funding has bee spread so thin CCDev will have taken more than 10 years before anyone ever attempts.”

If NASA’s original requests would have been funded we might have only taken 5 years from contract award to first test flight with crew, but even so we are on track to do that in 6-7 years, not 10.

“That is too slow…”

As we’ve been saying, but you weren’t listening. Instead you preferred to send money to Putin in Russia…

“These entrepreneurs we supposed to be fast.”

Dependent on the funding levels. Since Congress did not fully fund the program, it’s understandable why the fastest possible schedule was not able to be achieved. Causality my friend.