You said it Bob! TOTALLY agree.
Thing is, NASA has GOT to face reality at some point. Back in 71, NASA (yes at gov't insistence) tossed the Apollo hardware and started with a clean sheet doing shuttle. NASA oversold shuttle as the 'be all end all' of launch vehicles, with rediculous promises of "weekly or biweekly launches to orbit with crew and cargo at a cost of only a few hundred dollars a pound", essentially, parroting the lines by the nuclear power lobby at the time using promises of "electricity too cheap to meter" and other such nonsense, to get the 'reusable spacecraft' that NASA wanted. We all know how THAT turned out.
Now here we are, nearly 40 years later, with all the benefits of the last 50 years of spaceflight, research, development, and the advances of science, the state of the art, and materials science and processes, and what do we get?? A bloated overly expensive infrastructure that we can't afford that will take FIFTEEN YEARS to produce visible results?? We can do better than that.
Congress and the former Administration directed NASA to go with a "shuttle derived" solution, to minimize the disruption, job loss, and transition the workforce over from shuttle to the new program as seamlessly as possible, and to reduce the development of new equipment as much as possible by reusing the existing shuttle equipment to the greatext extent possible. That is NOT what happened!
NASA pulled a 'snow job' in the ESAS study to 'justify' their choice of Ares I/V so called "1.5 launch architecture" which, though sold with the subtlety and veracity of a used car salesman's pitch, wasn't too bad IN IT'S ORIGINAL FORM. Then reality set in and a chain reaction of changes and unforeseen issues, limitations, and forced changes ended up unraveling the whole thing. AS it stands right now, Ares is shuttle derived IN NAME ONLY. The ONLY equipment to be reused on Ares is the steel SRB casings. Everything else will be brand new. To add insult to injury, the SRB's themselves are NOT the existing four-segment shuttle boosters any longer, but for all intents and purposes, brand new boosters for which there is no flight history at all. It's a hollow argument; it's about like saying that the Saturn I was "Redstone derived" because it used 8 Redstone tanks strapped to a Jupiter missile core tank, and, well, "Redstone worked so this will too-- it's fundamentally the same!". Anybody with one eye and half sense could see through this argument on the face of it! To further rub salt in the wound, a number of Ares' problems would go away with the abandonment of the shuttle SRB casings. Switching to a non-recovered version of the SRB using spiral-wound filament casings would save considerable weight, not only of the casings themselves, but the weight of the no-longer needed recovery equipment for the SRB casing. BUT, it would be ANOTHER HUGE, COSTLY CHANGE which we cannot afford.
Already the schedule has slipped to the point that even staying with Ares, most of the workforce is GOING to be laid off after shuttle retirement. NOBODY, not even the gov't, can afford to pay the standing army of shuttle workers to 'polish wrenches' for 8-10 years until Ares is actually ready to fly.
Sad thing is, ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE! Go read the history of the SEI (Space Exploration Initiative) under old man Bush back in the 90's. He too proposed a grand adventure, a bold new vision of man's future in space, first building stations in LEO, moving on to return to the moon and building a moonbase, then pushing on to Mars. NASA called a "90 Day Study" to 'determine the best way forward to carry out this bold calling'. The "90 Day Report" was a pure snow-job to fund every NASA pet project that they'd wanted for the previous 20 years. Congress and the President told then-NASA Administrator Richard "Dick" Truly (former shuttle astronaut, BTW, and considered by many to be NASA's WORST Administrator) to pare the project down to a fundable, sustainable plan. After bandying around the plan within NASA and even MORE pet projects being added, culminating in an enormous Mars ship to be constructed in Earth orbit before setting out to Mars, it ballooned to a massive $450 BILLION DOLLAR price tag that was derisively laughed out of Congress and shredded by it's opponents called "BATTLESTAR GALACTICA".
Any of this sound familiar??
Fast forward 10 years. Baby Bush is at the helm and after the loss of another shuttle crew, NASA is directionless and adrift. Bush announces a "bold new plan to return humans to the moon and venture out into the solar system, going to the moon, Mars, and beyond!" Shuttle retirement is envisioned as being a smaller spaceplane (lifting body HL-20 like vehicle called Orbital Space Plane, or OSP) flying on an EELV. Political interests start figuring how much they'll lose when shuttle contracts for SRB's end, and the shuttle workforce that will be laid off en-masse at shuttle retirement and it's political fallout, so soon the cry arises for a "shuttle derived" solution. Bush appoints Mike Griffin as NASA Administrator, replacing Sean O'Keefe and Adm. Steidle who championed an affordable 'spiral development' plan based on EELV's and designing and building new equipment for new capabilities as it was needed and could be afforded. Griffin and his cohorts have grand plans for what was to become the Ares rockets. Another 90 day study is appointed called the ESAS (Exploration Systems Architecture Study) and it's results are a snow-job that surprise, surprise, find Griffin's 1.5 launch solution best, giving him justification for his Ares rockets. They hit problem after problem, the costs balloon uncontrollably, and the schedule slips off the edge of the paper. The whole thing gets cancelled. Some of the ESAS study members recently admitted ESAS was a snow-job and that a dual launch method using two identical rockets WAS the better choice, but that didn't fit Griffin's plans.
Sound familiar??
Griffin bet the farm, and lost. Now EVERYBODY is going to have to pay for that gamble.
Later! OL JR
