Hijexx wrote:

bucy wrote:

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year.

YES! Kill the stick!

Not a fan? I thought it was a good plan to have a crew rocket and a payload rocket.

If NASA must build out and operate CEV itself, it should launch on delta or atlas. The claims about "man rating" are completely specious -- Mike Griffin said as much himself!

What this basically boils down to is jobs. The obstacle to killing STS has been the 10,000s of government and contractor layoffs that will result in politically important states i.e. Florida. No matter what, the new system has to keep as many of those folks on the payroll as possible. So delta/atlas = giving all of the work to ULA (lockheed+boeing) is politically unacceptable. So what they did was refactor the pieces (ATK solid rockets, shuttle external tanks, etc) into Ares 1/5. But a lot of people are saying that the stick is an inherantly stupid design and this seems to be bourne out in all of the problems they're having on paper before they even get to the launch pad, e.g. weight, "thrust oscillation", etc.

I have no problem with the government spending billions of taxpayer dollars on the manned space program but I want to be sure that the taxpayers are getting the best bang for their buck and by "bang," I don't mean killing astronauts 7 at a time! I think the best thing the incoming administration could do is direct NASA not to own/operate its own launch vehicle program but instead only buy commercial launch services from ULA or SpaceX. What they should be doing is going back to all of the blue-sky "spaceplane" stuff that the industry has been less excited about pursuing the r&d internally.

In general, I think the NSF would be a much better model for a lot of NASA: they admister a huge government fund and PIs at Universities could write grants to NASA for funding for specific missions.

RE: SPACE.com -- Obama to Review Costs of Shuttle Replacement Vehicle