Jim's "Myth" thread: CxP's only problem was that it was underfunded.

[Jim]

a.  Hard to believe that this post was written with a straight face. Jim, you are letting your ties to the EELV mess cloud your vision re everything else.

1. The cost issue raised against Cx continues to annoy not because there were no cost issues but rather because the critics of Cx and STS have long used these arguments in such a misleading way. Any program at NASA or DoD is likely to have cost issues for a large number of reasons just some of which include:


(b) Pentagon and DoD requirements for everything from testing to paperwork are far higher than most businesses are used to, which means any new engineers, managers, vendors etc. have a steep learning curve about just how much more expensive things are likely go as they conform to the requirements.
 


(d) Costs on STS and Cx have also been abused by proponents of other options by heaping much of NASA's baseline costs on to these programs. The honest way to compare options (cost-wise) would be to exclude all overhead that NASA would have anyway from all programs and then compare what remains. STS should never, for example, have borne the burden of LC-39 which the taxpayers would never allow to be discarded. To be fare, now any "commercial" program should have to bear the full costs of LC-39 and JSC (suddenly a Dragon might not look so cheap)

2. If your "proof" that Cx was too expensive rests on the claim that 9 Billion was spent with nothing to show, then your argument holds no water.

3.  therefore the engineers did something wrong or the project was not workable. Both arguments de-value the work of thousands of serious, competent, diligent, hard-working engineers.

4.  Arguments over things like the PDR would irritate me more, but I find them understandable given what was happening both in the financial sense (after the Democrats took congress in 2006 and forced NASA to live under a CR instead of a budget) and in politics where one candidate (Obama) was running for president on a promise to gut Cx for education dollars and push the moon off by five years. Any program whose people actually care about it and the work they are doing is likely to get a bit rushed and desperate in that environment as they try to prove that they can finish the job if just permitted to (human nature). Direct would have met the same fate, as will Space-X if the day comes when Musk is running out of cash and starting to talk about shutting things down.

5. b Finally, your argument re-gurgitates a common criticism of the Cx program that I will simply no longer let pass without comment: Part of the job of the Ares I-X was to carry Orion and the crew to LEO, but the other part of the design which so many seem to always conveniently forget is that it was also the testbed for the J-2X and the 5-seg SRB. As a result, every difficulty imposed but the 5-seg SRB first stage was not entirely a negative (a failing of the Ares I-X team), but was in fact part of the overall understanding of the technology, performance, structures, etc. The Ares-I people were not idiots for not dropping the SRB and going to something else as soon as problems arose; Using an SRB was every bit as important a part of the effort as putting a capsule atop it. In other words: their mission was not "put six people into LEO" but was, rather, "put six people into LEO using an SRB as part of the development leading to Ares V"

6.  By the way, your beloved EELVs are just as big of a mess. They were supposed to provide the DoD with redundant reliable launchers at low cost while winning in the commercial markets. They've ended-up as the sort of "commercial" that Bolden and Garver are swooning over: Their only real, dependable customer is Uncle Sam and he pays more for them than all those early promises said he would.

7.   Also, since few people have seen all the engineering that went into them or the test and assembly facilities, any money their developers claim to have spent on them was probably wasted (sigh) Clearly too expensive and unsustainable  (your argument, applied to your sacred cows)

Completely incorrect.   Typical of a CxP koolade drinker and anti Obama.

a.  My shuttle, CxP, ELV (I have worked more Delta II's than EELV) and more importantly OSP background has provided me the knowledge that everything I posted is true and you are the who does not what he is talking about

1.  I am not talking just cost issues, but unsustainable costs and outrageous costs.

b.  Bogus point.  All the vendors have dealt with NASA and DOD many times.

c. Another bogus point and wrong.    Shuttle costs were its costs only and not the overhead for other programs.  As the sole user of LC-39, the shuttle was rightly charged with the burden of it.  And it would be ludicrous to charge any program that doesn't need it.  Same goes for JSC.  Dragon doesn't need it, it has it own mission control.  It serves no use other programs, other than ISS. 

2.  Yes, there is nothing to show.  Show me an operational launch vehicle.   I showed you 3 families, much more than just one.  Show me an operation launch pad, I showed 5-6.   We are talking the same about of money, 9 Billion, and CxP has no operational flight hardware to show for it.

3.  I does some work for CxP.  I am not bias, I knew CxP bad and was doomed years ago.  My argument does not devalue the engineers' work, the fact that the project was canceled does.  Just because they did hard work doesn't mean the program justified.  Also, the engineers could have gotten out and avoided CxP like I ended up doing.

5.  the point is wrong.  it was bait and switch.  Ares I originally had 4 segements and SSME.
Let the Ares V pay for the development of the J-2 and 5 segment and let cheap vehicles launch crew.  It would have been less expensive in the long run. 


6.  they are not in trouble and they cost less than legacy programs.  And they are operational and doing work for NASA.


7.  Wrong.  There were no bogus tests like AreI-X.  Also, both Delta IV and Atlas V were developed with only 1 billion dollars from the US Gov't with the companies contributing 2 billion.

to be continued

[edkyle99]

Of course it isn't complete.  Constellation was a plan to send astronauts to the Moon.  The other efforts you mention are terrific, but none of them were plans to send astronauts to the Moon - and none currently possess that capability.  They are no more "complete' in that regard than Ares/Orion/Altair.

 - Ed Kyle

I thought Ares 1 was a LEO only crew transport rocket built to support an, at this moment, completely paper Moon rocket.

If Ares 1 is a LEO only rocket, I would say Atlas, Delta, and even Falcon are at least a little more complete than Ares 1.

If you where referring to Ares 5 there, how is Ares 5 more real than the Atlas and Delta next phase rockets?

I think most of the attacks are against the Ares section of CxP, not the Orion/Altar.  Most Flexible path advocate on here support Orion, and want some form of Altiar (eventually)

The discussion from the first post was about Constellation as a whole, not just Ares.  The $9 billion mentioned was not spent only on Ares, it was spent on Ares, Orion, Launch Abort System, recovery system development and testing, test and launch facilities construction, tooling, component and propulsion development, etc., etc.,.   

 - Ed Kyle

[Danderman]

Don't build a launch vehicle around a fixed first stage and expect to get all of your spacecraft requirements to be met.

That was probably the most fundamental flaw, and the one they tried hardest to hide.

Let me translate this for the rest of us:

the killer for Ares was the SRB first stage. Its pretty close to impossible to increase the performance of that stage by any amount other than to double it (ie cluster two SRBs), so if Orion payload mass were to increase, the system wouldn't work. Or, if the integrated first and second stages were too heavy, the system wouldn't work.

The decision to use an SRB for the first killed Ares from the very beginning. It took a long time for Ares to realize it was dead, though.

[Namechange User]

The discussion from the first post was about Constellation as a whole, not just Ares.  The $9 billion mentioned was not spent only on Ares, it was spent on Ares, Orion, Launch Abort System, recovery system development and testing, test and launch facilities construction, tooling, component and propulsion development, etc., etc.,.   

 - Ed Kyle

Ed, while not a fan of the implementation of CxP myself, those details are completely irrelevent regardless of how true when one needs something to blame, crucify or point to as a focus for the lynching and when opinions are framed as "anti-Obama"

[Jim]

when opinions are framed as "anti-Obama"

I am not pro Obama, I am just calling out those who had an anti Obama slant before the change.

[yinzer]

Constellation was a spectacular program management and political failure. 

There is political support for spending a few billion dollar a year on manned spaceflight to keep a bunch of people employed and to get spectacular videos on the evening news.  There is not political support for spending enough money to get back to the moon, at least not yet.

So no one in power cared that a 5-segment SRB and J-2X would make developing the Ares V easier because they hadn't signed onto the Ares V in any meaningful way.  All that the change did was push the start of Orion operations back significantly to the point that there was going to be a long period of no American manned spaceflight, lots of disruption to the people currently employed in the manned spaceflight enterprise, and a lack of awesome videos on the evening news.

I think NASA leadership thought they were going to get more money to bring the schedule back in, but no one fell for it.

And here we are.

[pathfinder_01]

I don’t think valid comparisons can be made between commercial endeavors and government programs. Commercial efforts must have expected financial returns commensurate with expected financial risk. Governmental efforts just need to be politically feasible. Constellation would likely have been very different if it wasn’t required to utilize existing resources in Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida.

Constellation was designed from the outset to be man-rated, in fact, ultra-man-rated. The commercial efforts have yet to tackle man-rating. Apparently man-rating is a significant hurdle. There was testimony during the Augustine Commission that it would take seven years to man-rate the Delta IV Heavy. Falcon 9 is having difficulty demonstrating the viability of its self-destruct mechanism; man-rating is a long way beyond that.

From the outset Constellation was designing for LEO, the Moon, and to some extent Mars. What proportion of the commercial efforts are focused beyond LEO?

Constellation has had two flight tests which were pretty much on-time and pretty much successful. I know those points will be disputed so I’ll leave the quantification of “pretty much” to others.

Designing launch vehicles and spacecraft today should require smaller weight-lifting and weight margins than in the 1960s. The process is more mature today than it was then, the computational capabilities of design hardware and software is greater, and everything electronic is smaller, more capable, and requires less energy.

We’re all “feelin’ the love” for the shuttle just now, but if we could go back to say 1975 when the shuttle was at Constellation’s current stage of development . . .

(1) How late was the first flight?

(2) How does the demonstrated flight rate compare to the design flight rate?

(3) What proportion of the design payload capacity was ever achieved?

This U.S. voter and U.S. taxpayer greatly preferred the 2009 program-of-record (Constellation) to the 2010 program-of-record (nothing).

(1) How late was the first flight?

Formally started in 1972, however there was a long period of design beforehand. If I recall correctly the shuttle should have made its first flight in 1979, but did not make its first flight till 1981. In addition in 1979 Columbia was delivered to KSC. It did have tile problems, but on a whole it was a lot more complete than Orion is atm. In addition enterprise made its test flight in 1976(4 years later).

Orion was proposed in 2005 and promised to make its first flight in 2008, and the LEO part Ares+Orion making it's manned flight in 2012. We are still waiting for the unmanned flight. Ares 1-X did make a flight in 4 years but proved we are at least 3 years late by NASA standards and more likely 4-6 by Augustine. Even worse the moon goal of 2015 got pushed to 2020 leaving Orion a capsule with nothing to do till then and nowhere to go(the ISS was to be splashed to free funding for this program). If Orion survives as CRV, I think it is good irony.

Perhaps the problem was unrealistic schedule?? Or unrealistic expectations of what could be done in that schedule? Or what should have been prioritized in that schedule? I can see Orion being ready in less than 4 year but I can't see any rocket being developed from scratch in that time period esp. if you have to develop the capsule at the same time. Not counting the whole lunar aspect too.
 


(2) How does the demonstrated flight rate compare to the design flight rate?

The problem for the lunar program was that they only were planning 2 flights a year!!!! The shuttle program might have lied about the flight rate, but we are currently able to do 4-6 flights a year with the shuttle and spend months in orbit at the ISS. The represents a loss of capacity. We were abandoning LEO where we could do many missions for the two times a year, two week moon trip. Moon bases were surrendered and Orion would have arrived too late to be a taxi to the splashed ISS.



(3) What proportion of the design payload capacity was ever achieved?


In the case of the shuttle all of it was eventually achieved. Columbia was short a bit, but weight savings gains during development and unexpectedly good performance of the engines, allowed Challenger to be slightly lighter than Columbia and Discovery and Atlantis 1000 pounds lighter. Even Columbia herself was lighter that what Enterprise would have been if fully built.

However the trouble for Orion is the fact that it could not reach LEO on ARES-1. This is more than just falling short. Orion had given up touching down on land and Reusability and still could was too heavy for the puny stick to lift.

Programmatically the shuttle program was progressing better than Orion.

[Jorge]

There are so many inaccuracies in this post that it is barely worth my time to correct them all, but I must try.

Orion was proposed in 2005 and promised to make its first flight in 2008, and the LEO part Ares+Orion making it's manned flight in 2012.

CEV was proposed on January 14, 2004. It was to be "developed and tested" (the meaning of this was undefined; "test" is not necessarily equivalent to "flight test") by 2008, and "to conduct the first manned mission no later than 2014", not 2012.

From the start few at NASA took the 2008 date seriously. There was no way to do a meaningful flight test by that date; it would have been an empty boilerplate at best. The lack of visible progress NASA had made by early 2005 under O'Keefe/Steidle confirmed this. That was part of the reason Griffin was selected to replace O'Keefe in early 2005.

ESAS defined CEV as an Apollo-style capsule in late 2005. The CEV was offically named "Orion" on July 20, 2006. The prime contract was awarded to Lockheed-Martin on August 31, 2006.

Griffin never made any promises with respect to the 2008 develop/test milestone. He did, however, attempt to accelerate the 2014 date for the first manned flight. In public statements he stated that the first manned flight could be accelerated to as early as 2012, with sufficient funding. That funding never materialized. Internally, 2014 remained the official deadline - and in fact, is still the official target.

Even worse the moon goal of 2015 got pushed to 2020

Incorrect. The original goal was 2020. There was never a goal of 2015.

Perhaps the problem was unrealistic schedule?? Or unrealistic expectations of what could be done in that schedule?

Unrealistic expectations were part of the problem (especially with respect to the 2008 "test" date, and especially given that the goals of that "test" were left undefined), but from my vantage point the biggest problem is that you seem to be making up what the schedules were, without regard for the actual history.

I suggest some remedial reading on your part.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/54868main_bush_trans.pdf

http://www.space.com/news/060720_cev_orion.html

http://www.space.com/news/060831_nasa_cev_contract.html

[alexw]

Constellation was a spectacular program management and political failure.  ...
no one in power cared that a 5-segment SRB and J-2X would make developing the Ares V easier because they hadn't signed onto the Ares V in any meaningful way.  All that the change did was push the start of Orion operations back significantly ...

   You allude to an important point here, relevant to the thread title. The morphing of "Safe Simple Soon" into 5-seg + J2X was apparently in part a strategic gambit by Griffin vs the Congress, to fund his preferred HLV by the back door. (Instead of biting the bullet on airstart SSME). It's ironic that that gambit, introduced by a supposedly good engineer, failed due to fundamentally poor engineering strategy. Then the whole thing unraveled pretty swiftly. Rotten at the core.
-Alex

[jongoff]

Of course it isn't complete.  Constellation was a plan to send astronauts to the Moon.  The other efforts you mention are terrific, but none of them were plans to send astronauts to the Moon - and none currently possess that capability.  They are no more "complete' in that regard than Ares/Orion/Altair.

I think this is part of the problem.  CxP was never really a "plan to send astronauts to the Moon".  It was a plan to build an LEO booster and capsule that *might* have been used as part of a lunar transportation architecture, but only if 2-4 more presidential administrations and around a dozen congresses down the road decided to give it the funding for it to become a lunar program.  Long term plans may make people feel all warm inside, but really anything more than a few years out is little better than a cheap dimestore science fiction novel.  We *might* get something like what they're predicting, but acting as though it is a real plan when most of the political cost has to be borne by future dupes really doesn't seem like much of a "plan" to me.

~Jon

[MrTim]

Completely incorrect.   Typical of a CxP koolade drinker and anti Obama.

As you often do, you skip the bits you cannot refute and then pronounce as wrong things you know were not what I meant. I am not a Cx koolaid drinker (people who have read enough of my posts know full well that Cx was far from my ideal choice). Anti Obama? Not so much at first (though I was indeed concerned about things he said) but I have certainly turned solidly against him in light of (a) how boldly he lied to the people at NASA in 2008 (b) the most incompetent roll-out of a nebulous non-plan in history (c) a very transparently dishonest attempt to circumvent the law on scuttling Cx.

a.  My shuttle, CxP, ELV (I have worked more Delta II's than EELV) and more importantly OSP background has provided me the knowledge that everything I posted is true and you are the who does not what he is talking about

That's why you had no response to all the items you seem to believe did not exist and work you think was not done? Everything you posted it true? Nope. Not so much.

1.  I am not talking just cost issues, but unsustainable costs and outrageous costs.

Bogus argument. If any other program including EELV were given the budget treatment Cx was given, that program would also be "unsustainable". The argument only works if it would not happen to other programs treated the same way. Outrageous costs? Possibly. I tend to think certain vendors (like ATK) charged too much, but I am unwilling to make that judgement without seeing their justification.

b.  Bogus point.  All the vendors have dealt with NASA and DOD many times.

Invalid judgment. I was clearly making a more general point about costs on DoD and NASA projects. I have plenty of experience with the DoD end of this and have seen it over and over again. Even teams within an otherwise experienced vendor will mis-judge the cost overruns that can occur.

c. Another bogus point and wrong.    Shuttle costs were its costs only and not the overhead for other programs.  As the sole user of LC-39, the shuttle was rightly charged with the burden of it.  And it would be ludicrous to charge any program that doesn't need it.  Same goes for JSC.  Dragon doesn't need it, it has it own mission control.  It serves no use other programs, other than ISS. 

I do not know if it's intended or not but you clearly missed the point here and your answer fails to answer it. Assuming STS shuts down this year, are you saying LC-39 will be demolished and the land sold-off? Of course not. Some other part of NASA will have the complex stuffed onto their budget (thereby proving the dishonesty of having it on the STS books) Furthermore, the Obama/Bolden plan is to spend Billions upgrading KSC so that commercial uses it. Just within the past 72 hours Gerst was on record saying the VAB would be upgraded to handle EELV and similar launchers as part of that process. The Obama/Bolden plan claims it will work to preserve jobs by encouraging the new commercial flights to use LC-39. If Obama and  Bolden are not lying, the the commercial guys will have to have the LC-39 costs added to their balance sheets... unless of course it was always a sham to have STS and Cx carry it on their balance sheets. I am not saying governments bookkeeping rules were being abused or violated in the past, just that the accounting methods were very misleading by their nature. It's a consistency argument: You either keep KSC or you get rid of it (and my bet is the nation keeps it; it is after all a historical landmark) and if you keep it you either assign the costs of it to the programs that use it, or to some general NASA infrastructure budget... but if you assign its costs to the projects that use it, then you must be consistent in order to be honest.

2.  Yes, there is nothing to show.  Show me an operational launch vehicle.   I showed you 3 families, much more than just one.  Show me an operation launch pad, I showed 5-6.   We are talking the same about of money, 9 Billion, and CxP has no operational flight hardware to show for it.

Now you have changed your basic argument... which was that there was nothing to show for the money (not that there was not yet an operational launch vehicle). I listed a large number of things and your only response was to re-shape the argument. As you well know, Cx was not schedules to have a flight-ready vehicle yet and any program will have "no flight-ready vehicles" long before they are scheduled to have them. By your reasoning, EELV was a total failure and waste of funds up until the first launch vehicle was standing up at the launch complex.

3.  I does some work for CxP.  I am not bias, I knew CxP bad and was doomed years ago.  My argument does not devalue the engineers' work, the fact that the project was canceled does.  Just because they did hard work doesn't mean the program justified.  Also, the engineers could have gotten out and avoided CxP like I ended up doing.

Does not matter. I knew a guy who worked Apollo (pre-fire) and left thinking they would never reach the moon. A bitter assessment by somebody who is unhappy with the program and thinks it is doomed is not equivalent to some sort of prophetic vision... even if later political acts force the predicted end for political reasons.
 

5.  the point is wrong.  it was bait and switch.  Ares I originally had 4 segements and SSME.
Let the Ares V pay for the development of the J-2 and 5 segment and let cheap vehicles launch crew.  It would have been less expensive in the long run. 

Please knock-off the allegations of illegal activity. Yes, we all know they originally sketched-out an air-start SSME and a 4-seg SRB. We also all know that they changed the upperstage engine and added the 5th segment. But they kep the essential program plan of a single SRB on the crew launcher and using the crew launcher to develop and test the SRB and upperstage engine for the cargo rocket. Like I have said, not my favorite scheme, but not a scam, not fraud, not bait-and-switch and they did most-certainly have things to show for the money they spent. I guess you are free to claim that all changes made to Atlas and Delta over the years are "bait-and-switch". As for other things being less expensive... that might well be true, but that was not the program the Cx folks were given; they were operating with a set of constraints many other options would not have met. As for operational costs, I am still not sure because the government has still not quantified all the financial side effects of DoD solid motor costs rising.

6.  they are not in trouble and they cost less than legacy programs.  And they are operational and doing work for NASA.

Only because these "unsustainable" rockets continue to be subsidised at premium prices by the taxpayer via DoD and NASA. If the federal government wanted to, it could cut their funding and kill them off too. They are not able to compete in the commercial world. When we all pontificate on the "sustainability" of the costs of any of these programs we should use the same assumptions and rules, otherwise we are making an invalid apples/oranges comparison. EELVs are only not in trouble because congress keeps subsidizing them not because they are commercially viable.

7.  Wrong.  There were no bogus tests like AreI-X.

Garbage argument I am tired of reading. Ares I-X was hardly the first airframe to fly with a particular outer mold line and mass distribution to validate CFD and wind tunnel models and test controls. I have run such tests myself and I am left to conclude that you either lack sufficient understanding if the hows and whys or that you know this is a bogus argument but you intend to mislead readers who do not understand the issues. Had I been involved in managing the Ares I effort I would have insisted on more than just one Ares I-X type of test. (just as a failure on a flight does not mean the failure will occur on all flights, a successful flight does not assure that all flights will be successful) A real airframe moving through the real atmosphere under real flight conditions will tell you things you might never see in CFD or on a small wind tunnel model; the things you learn from a flight can help you improve your mathematical models. The only way you can claim the I-X test was "bogus" is if you saw the evil project managers planning it as a scam and throwing-out the data after the test (or not even gathering any data) If you have no proof that the managers planned the test as a scam, you have no moral right to make the accusation.

Also, both Delta IV and Atlas V were developed with only 1 billion dollars from the US Gov't with the companies contributing 2 billion.

Not even close. Delta and Atlas have had many Billions poured into them over decades; every flight is instrumented and gathers data which benefits the programs... oh, unless you want to say that we are all victims of "bait-and-switch" and the current generation of Atlas and Delta are unrelated to previous rockets carrying the same names 

Like I said, I do not like the "bait-and-switch" argument, but if it is to be used, it ought to be deployed fairly to make a point.

[MrTim]

Of course it isn't complete.  Constellation was a plan to send astronauts to the Moon.  The other efforts you mention are terrific, but none of them were plans to send astronauts to the Moon - and none currently possess that capability.  They are no more "complete' in that regard than Ares/Orion/Altair.

I think this is part of the problem.  CxP was never really a "plan to send astronauts to the Moon".  It was a plan to build an LEO booster and capsule that *might* have been used as part of a lunar transportation architecture, but only if 2-4 more presidential administrations and around a dozen congresses down the road decided to give it the funding for it to become a lunar program.  Long term plans may make people feel all warm inside, but really anything more than a few years out is little better than a cheap dimestore science fiction novel.  We *might* get something like what they're predicting, but acting as though it is a real plan when most of the political cost has to be borne by future dupes really doesn't seem like much of a "plan" to me.

~Jon

It was not as unreasonable as its loudest critics insist. The idea was to get the manned launcher going first (which would have pacified congress because there would be ongoing space flights and astronauts) and then build the monster... and do it within essentially flat budgets, throttling the development work according to available dollars. The evidence NASA had before it was that most members have no clue about what any particular shuttle flight is about, yet congress continues to fund NASA decade after decade at a more-or-less flat rate while mostly ignoring it (as long as there are no fatal accidents). Furthermore, history told NASA they could expect congress to help them financially recover from both Katrina and the loss of Columbia... but neither happened.

Personally, I dislike the entire idea of disposable rockets, but there were reasonable reasons for the choices made and the people working that  program deserve some defense in otherwise generally hostile forums. If we want real sustainable exploration, we need to drop the cost of access to space both by-the-kilogram and by the cubic meter. Griffin chose to do this with mass fraction by building a massive launcher, some people here prefer to do it with a high volume of small disposable rockets, I strongly believe we needed to keep NASA on a path to perfect the re-usable launch vehicle. I feel like we built the Wright Flyer, then flew it for 30 years without ever trying a Curtiss pusher, for example, and now we have decided there is no future in airplanes and we are going to go back to hot air balloons (sigh)

"Where there is no vision..."

[Proponent]

In general, we don't design launch vehicles with large enough payload margins in this country. (The US.)

Incorrect, Yes, we do.  EELV has/had it, but spacecraft keep growing.

It was a pretty safe bet, though, that spacecraft would keep growing, no?  In this case the blame attaches to the bureaucrats who set the specs rather than to the engineers who built the rockets.

[MATTBLAK]

1:  Ares 1 was not needed. Delta IV-H could have been the Crew Launch vehicle. It was mostly developed and could be man-rated and ready far quicker than Ares 1 with sufficient payload margins and no 'Black Zones'. Don't believe anything else because it is heavily-biased, ATK and Griffin-Apparatchik spin. Period. I know Ares 1 could have been made to work, with enough money and effort. But it's payload margin would have been razor-thin and the cost of this vehicle - conservatively estimated at $35 billion - is ridiculous and simply not worth the effort.

2:  Ares V was too big and expensive: NASA was trying to build a Schwarzenegger booster on a DeVito budget. Replacing the Crawlers, Causeway road, launchpads, VAB alterations, scrapping Shuttle E.T. tooling... Ridiculous. For this and all the other reasons touted by the DIRECT folk and the Side-Mount advocates; Ares V was a fantasy rocket. A bit sad, but a fact. The Lunar mission architecture could have been made to work with some pragmatic restructuring and re-design for smaller, more affordable boosters.

3: Orion: actually, in my opinion there was not much wrong with the Apollo-moldline retread. But a 4.5 or even 4-meter diameter crew module would have been good enough, not the 5 meter wide design. On a decently powerful crew launch vehicle (Delta or Atlas V-Heavies) they could have kept all Orion's reusability features, including dry-landings. And although I would have preferred a shift away from hypergolic propulsion on the Service Module, this was not essential.

4:  Altair: I've had mixed feelings about the concept of a use-once, disposable lander. I would have preferred that Constellation pioneered a fully or even partly re-usable lander, able to be refuelled from an L-1 or L-2 based Propellant Depot and flown remotely and unmanned if need be. If the capability to dock 2x landers with the Depot was chosen, a rescue vehicle would be available at all times, able to be dispatched to the trouble zone remotely at any time. The two landers could alternate between missions, giving time to replace one of them should they become damaged or worn-out in some way. Also, the crew need only go to the Depot/Way station in the Orion - in a single launch - saving Mission costs in the long run.

And even with a hypergolic Depot, much of the Moon would be reachable at all times. If a horizontal, largely 'one-piece' configuration Altair were chosen, then Cargo and equipment could be hung beneath the chassis, able to be lowered to the regolith by a simple(ish) winch system. The crew cabin would be perched on top of the design with the seperate airlock we've come to know from the notional Altair concept art we've seen. And for a Cargo version, merely delete the crew cabin and airlock altogether. On the Horizontal concept, depending on the placement of the Descent/Ascent engine(s), the cargo could be 'underslung' on the chassis or ride down on jettisonable 'saddlebags'. Either way, this may be an easier way to unload such payloads than lifting it from on-high, down from a vertical configured, tall lander.

Also, a horizontal configured lander may be more suitable for long-term adaptation to Mars missions -- fitting an Aeroshell, a low center-of-gravity for high angle-of-attack aero-entries etc.

In conclusion, doing away with Ares 1 and V to make wiser choices for boosters and some mission architecture -- this would have shaved tens of billions off the cost of Constellation. Much smarter people than I have said so!!

[Archibald]

Orion: actually, in my opinion there was not much wrong with the Apollo-moldline retread. But a 4.5 or even 4-meter diameter crew module would have been good enough, not the 5 meter wide design

Excellent. One can dream of sophisticated shapes like biconics or lifting bodies but, the thruth is, old Apollo rule. It is still the best shape for lunar missions - along, maybe, Gemini blunt body and Soyuz. But the last two were never tested on lunar reentry, not with astronauts on board (Zond was rather troublesome).

About the diameter: in May  2003 Dale Myers and its team pushed for an Apollo OSP http://klabs.org/richcontent/Reports/NASA_Reports/apollo_hw_crv_ctv.htm

Myers recommended to enlarge Apollo by 8 - 15 % from the original 3.95 m.
That's 4.50 m, halfway between Apollo and the actual Orion...

[MATTBLAK]

Well there you go! I didn't know that, thanks for the link. I always said the 5 meter Orion - and especially the 5.5 meter version - was way too large and heavy. I know the 5.5 meter ship was intended to make 6 Astronauts comfortable, but sheesh! What a monster. Incidentally, I think many of us know that such a big Orion design was chosen to deliberately keep it too large for EELV launchers; at least the versions that existed when ESAS was being formulated. But as it turned out, Ares 1 was finding it hard to close its margins and capabilities without gutting the Orion uber-capsule.

Incidentally, getting back to the funding issue -- I too believe that Constellation was never funded to a level to ensure success. One of the reasons Apollo succeeded was because it received generous funding early on. The cuts came later. But if one didn't know better, one could claim that Constellation was *deliberately* programmed for failure from the beginning. But I struggle to understand how anyone could have believed Constellation was going to get some sort of Magic-Beanstalk, "somehow, someday, you'll see!" funding boost to finally come into focus after Shuttle. Especially in this era of post-Hurricane Katrina, two wars and the world economic meltdown. The architects of Constellation needed to think smarter, think more pragmatically to ensure Constellation could somehow be made "cancel-proof". Not create some wish-list of fantasy Mega-rockets that nobody was going to pay for, for decades to come.

Now, we are seeing a similar "somehow, someday, you'll see!" faith-based approach to the so-called "Obama spaceplan". WHO is going to ensure the new plan -- such as it is -- is cancel-proof? WHO is going to make hard decisions to preserve sensible goals and destinations? WHAT destination? WHERE? At least with the Moon, mankind could learn (or is that relearn?) how to traverse the solar system and adapt the vehicles and technologies for other missions. But building vehicles to land on Asteroids will mean you can land on... Asteroids and not much else.

America needs to do better. It CAN do better in space. Constellation doesn't need cancellation; it needs pragmatic alteration

[MP99]

Yes, we all know they originally sketched-out an air-start SSME and a 4-seg SRB. We also all know that they changed the upperstage engine and added the 5th segment. But they kep the essential program plan of a single SRB on the crew launcher and using the crew launcher to develop and test the SRB and upperstage engine for the cargo rocket.

Ares I (at least ESAS LV13.1) was to be 4-seg PBAN + SSME-based upper stage.

Ares V "classic" (ESAS LV27.3) was to be 5-seg HTPB + 5x SSME + 2x J-2-based upper stage.

The only commonality between was the SSME (similar to Merlin 1C / Merlin vac).

cheers, Martin

[jimgagnon]

Don't build a launch vehicle around a fixed first stage and expect to get all of your spacecraft requirements to be met.

Clearly this is the fundamental flaw in the overall Constellation design. All other issues with Constellation arise from or become much more difficult/expensive to solve because of this.

One question I would like to see answered is why this mistake was committed? We've all heard of Griffin's "my way or the highway" style of management, and we all know of the then NASA IG's "ineffectiveness" that allowed all sorts of abuses to happen, but Griffin was supposed to be a smart and talented designer. Was this a case of hubris, false pride, graft, institutional inertia, or something else that let such a fundamental flaw continue on so long that it might be impossible to kill?

It's a question NASA needs to answer and then solve institutionally, otherwise this will keep happening. Space travel is really tough, and there just isn't room for this kind of nonsense if you want to do it safely and successfully.

[nooneofconsequence]

Just about everything Jim says can be independently defended from the Augustine committee collateral, even if you don't wish to value his credentials to speak on this issue - which almost everyone I know in this business do trust.

MrTim, your credibility is strained to say the least. In debates, on the floor, and even in courtrooms this approach to attack has dubious merit.

Although it does remind me of the more creepier moments when the Augustine committee had to 'pussy foot' around POR.

As to "your" DOD/NASA experience with overbudget projects, that's entirely a non-argument developed out of their joint "original sin" - that of the political birth of an unreasonable project predestined to failure.

May I speak to the DOD/NASA projects I've had the pleasure of seeing successfully accomplished ON BUDGET and ON TIME which were CORRECTLY SCOPED with WELL FINANCED contractors who were APPROPRIATELY rewarded for their work.

THIS IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE WORKING TOO. Not this cynical, twisted world where you pursue things for indirect agendas.

Jim's dead on here. Ares I consisted of existed, predeveloped SSME and UNMODIFIED 4seg, scoped for some bent metal and airstart - PERIOD THE  END. When that failed it wasn't Ares I anymore.

Matt Blak is right we never even needed it - and even if you don't like EELV *IT WAS THE PRIOR CANDIDATE FOR THE JOB*.

Danny Deger, whose job was evaluating crew safety, did a thorough job on this forum of professionally evaluating Ares I safety concerns, that was the kind of thing pre-ESAS that should have kept this $9B waste from ever seeing the light of day, and you deny it like a mindless politician and don't take the trouble to address his reasoned engineering position.

There's a ton of DIRECT work here that addresses all of this concurrently for many years, outlining an approach that could have generated a full up test of a vehicle for the same or less budget that we've consumed, even if you quibble about the substantial volume of evidence Jim's submitted.

Add:
How you can attack Atlas/Delta/Shuttle development with very cost effective "all up" testing, where there isn't an Ares test that isn't marginal in one to many ways, is an overreach that even a shyster lawyer wouldn't dare. Many engineers who raised these issues from early on got shown the door too.

Perhaps you think there's some inner purity that's to be protected in all of this? Because frankly from an engineering/management perspective, this is the long, *expensive* way around the barn, where you don't get a success but an agonized, extended cancellation.

Adding a seg to a 4 seg is A WHOLE NEW STAGE - not SDLV. Hello?

[jongoff]

Personally, I dislike the entire idea of disposable rockets, but there were reasonable reasons for the choices made and the people working that  program deserve some defense in otherwise generally hostile forums. If we want real sustainable exploration, we need to drop the cost of access to space both by-the-kilogram and by the cubic meter. Griffin chose to do this with mass fraction by building a massive launcher, some people here prefer to do it with a high volume of small disposable rockets, I strongly believe we needed to keep NASA on a path to perfect the re-usable launch vehicle. I feel like we built the Wright Flyer, then flew it for 30 years without ever trying a Curtiss pusher, for example, and now we have decided there is no future in airplanes and we are going to go back to hot air balloons (sigh)

"Where there is no vision..."

I actually agree almost 100% with this paragraph.

~Jon