Ummmm, who gives a damn who owns it as long as we are guaranteed the ability to use the rocket?!?!?!? "Nasa never gets rid of ownership"(NASA always goes OVER budget!) Am I confused? Why not let private industry develope this and market it?..They may be able to LOWER the costs...Or are we afraid of a little competition? Afraid someone will beat us back to the moon with a better system than Orion/Altair, on their own ride?

He observed that NASA never gets rid of the ownership and that it is important to feel ownership, because the Agency, in fact, owns the system and its design.

That puts the citizens of the United States and United States taxpayers right out of the loop. Can anyone tell me why this particular NASA administrator still has a job with that kind of consistent attitude about the people who pay his salary?

He noted that lessons learned from the Ares 1 vehicle integration are being applied, as well as from previous contract constructs.

Hmmm. Doesn't sound like it to me when you read the very next line:

He stated that the contracting approach includes maintaining NASA ownership of overall Ares V vehicle system architecture and key discipline areas

Because NASA has done such an exemplary job with Orion and ARES-1? My primary job is as a system architect. One thing you must be good at doing is knowing when an architecture has "more bad than good" and being able to say goodbye to it without being personally attached to it. NASA has clearly not been able to do that with ARES-1, and they have made another crucial architecture mistake by allowing their fetish for ARES-1 to cause them to make compromises in the other (more fundamental) architecture element Orion. They have forced Orion to lose weight by getting rid of things that were previously requirements, all to save the "pet" ARES-1. NASA's record as a competent system architect on ESAS is a disaster. Plain and simple. I worry how they can take the best idea of ESAS in ARES-V and potentially screw it up!

I'd rather have NASA own it. Industry has to answer to stock holders who want nothing but profits. NASA has to answer to tax payers, who want nothing but performance.

Ok, flame away.

Disaster - A Recipe

1 gigantic rocket with one customer and one team of suppliers without competition once awarded

1 set of cost-plus contracts with the suppliers needed for such rocket

1 set of rocket designers who hasn't made a new rocket in 30 years and has never made one on cost and schedule and whose systems were responsible for the loss of life on the most recent rocket

1 fixed budget that cannot accommodate overruns and changes

1 apocryphal notion that the way Apollo did things can be applied to today's environment

Combine ingredients in Northern Alabama and at 3rd and E in SE DC. Stir. In fact, Stir ad infinitum. Occasionally send prototype lumps of disaster to the Florida East Coast. Build new buildings in Northern Alabama and Southern Mississippi to test disaster. Ignore how things are done in Colorado and on the other side of the river. Keep stirring.

Small scale disaster is ready when rocket from Hawthorne or the other side of the river achieves orbit carrying humans and you're still stirring.

Large scale disaster is ready when red flag with yellow star is planted in Mare Tranquilitatis and you're still stirring.

" . . . NASA never gets rid of the ownership and that it is important to feel ownership, because the Agency, in fact, owns the system and its design."

That's just another way of saying that NASA considers its contractors as nothing more than Job Shop operators whose principal directive is to say "yes, sir, right away, sir" and then fall on their swords when something goes wrong (remember who fell on the sword after the Apollo I fire - NASA dictated 100% O2 at ground level pressure when Rockwell said it was obviously too dangerous).

IMHO, for LEO access, NASA should utilize the "Air Mail" model by supporting commercial infrastructure development. Outside access to Ares is unlikely.

The problem is not 'ownership' but partnership. EELV has been a great success between the Air Force and it's corporate partners that NASA has snubbed repeatedly. EELV has fallen short as commercial launchers because of lack of economic scale - NASA as a customer with USAF would bring flight frequency up enough to interest other businesses - something impossible w/ a govt owned-and-operated Ares I/V infrastructure. Everything else has been ignored in a race after something "Shuttle-derived".

Generally, all the payloads proposed by ESAS could be flown empty on EELV, stacked and fueled in LEO. This would encourage higher flight rates of commodity rockets and new entrants & products of same services while enabling discreet separation of activities. Ie. space stations and deep space access eventually become routine for mid-large organizations. NASA's real expertise is in deep space operations (ISS and probes/SMD) so why the obsession with the "first mile" of the expedition?

Spending $20-50,000,000,000 developing an anti-competitive medium-lift vehicle and maybe-HLV with exactly one user is a non-starter in the current climate. NASA's walled garden is likely doomed via the same economics that are causing all the mobile carriers in the US to adopt open devices and networks. It simply costs more to operate your own anything in the services/information age.

The world has a glut in launch capacity - what is most useful is more payloads, not more (expensive) rockets. This goes for private interests as well - we all need to look into innovative uses of space assets and new space projects. This is about jobs and all that - creating hundreds of thousands, then millions, of aerospace jobs doing everything from building to operating space stations, commsats, mining, SPS elevators and all your other space cadet dreams. The problem is that building a maybe-HLV and it's problem-to-begin with sibling is in direct conflict with opening a wider space frontier.

here's a cool video from Bagtaggar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnJLPpGIGQ

NASA has to answer to tax payers, who want nothing but performance.

So where is the performance NASA is delivering on ARES-1, Danny? It appears the only way they know to "deliver performance" is by downsizing Orion.

Industry has to answer to stock holders who want nothing but profits.

Before industry can achieve profits, they have to meet requirements. Requirement not met? No profits. In fact, industry has to spend more of its own money to meet requirements they failed to meet initially. So if they don't do it right the first time, it actually means less profits. This is why a private firm always has more incentive than a government agency. Taxpayers rarely hold NASA accountable. Shareholders always hold corporations accountable.

Ray

From the Aldridge Commission Report, June 2004:

"NASA’s relationship to the private sector, its organizational structure, business culture, and management processes – all largely inherited from the Apollo era – must be decisively transformed to implement the new, multi-decadal space exploration vision."

With the tone of Steve Cook's letter, it looks like NASA has yet to be "decisively transformed"; in fact, it sounds the Ares program wants to return to the organizational culture of the Apollo era, instead of moving on to a new approach to doing business.

Just a question...anyone else wonder why Spacex isn't the model being followed? They actually had a problem and fixed it in a reasonable amount of time and moved on proving the fix...yeah those stock holders HATE that...The majority of taxpayer just wanna see cool space pictures, they dont care how we get there...Stock holder would indeed hold the feet to the fire and want results at the same time...do some research on spacex and get back to me...

Is locking America into a mega NASA launch program that will cost hundreds of billions the best thing for America, or is it a way to lock out America's commercial launch companies?

Was the starting of the COTS program a serious attempt to stimulate a vibrant American commercial space industry, or was it just a small bone thrown to the new space advocates?

Lets look at what COTS A-C was offered. 500 million dollars to be spread over a few different companies to design and build a cost effective rocket and a delivery capsule for suppling the ISS.
Everyone knows that this is chicken feed. Look at what it costs NASA to design and build a rocket. With this kind of funding, did people really want COTS to succeed?

In spite of the odds, we have a new space company that is close to success and a few others that also have a good shot at succeeding. When they success, they will bring a new era of LOW cost space flight to the world and make America competitve again in the world launch market. By lowering launch costs, they will save NASA and American taxpayers billions and billions of dollars, thereby opening the doors to SUSTAINABLE space flight beyond LEO.

But has NASA embraced these American commercial space companies and said, "For America's sake, we will work together, so that we continue to have an American space industry that is second to none?" When I read articles like this, it makes me wonder.

If our American commercial space companies are going to flurrish, then they need to be funded through COTS D, so that they can develop human rated craft. I'm sure that when President Elect Obama comes into office, he will make the funding of COTS D a priority.

The numbers I am hearing, is that it will cost well over 200 billion to build Constellation. When you add in a moonbase, the cost will be well over a trillion dollars. When COTS D is funded, I hope the numbers the new President and Congress comes up with are at least a modest 2 to 3 billion. Our country will make that money back in no time, with lower cost launches.

I hope that whoever Obama chooses to be NASA's next administrator, will be a strong advocate of commercial space and to bringing launch costs down.

The problem with COTS isn't that it was chicken feed, it's that COTS success isn't a prerequisite to an entry in the CRS competition. SpaceX and Orbital may succeed brilliantly and both be fielding CRS vehicles by 2010, only to find all the contracts have already been let to a consortium of same-old same-old companies. In a better world, there would have been 5 COTS competitors funded at $250bln a piece, with a guarantee that the first two to arrive at ISS with a vehicle would get exclusive 5-year CRS contracts and a funded shot at COTS-D. So what if no one succeeded? What difference would it make? We were planning on paying the Russians, Europeans, and Japanese anyway.

@ William Barton

"SpaceX and Orbital may succeed brilliantly and both be fielding CRS vehicles by 2010, only to find all the contracts have already been let to a consortium of same-old same-old companies."

I think that is why Space-X came up with the DragonLab. Elon Musk is a smart enough businessman to make sure the company has multiple revenue streams potentially available should the main customer back out.

I'm pretty sure that they will be able to find SOMETHING to do with Dragon, no matter who gets the various NASA contracts. There is some evidence to suggest that the biggest corporations aren't willing to rely on governmental spaceflight providers for microgravity research anymore (hence Bigelow). If nothing else, it has been shown that there are rich people willing to pay $30 million a pop for a space jaunt, even if Dragon is a lot smaller than the ISS.

NASA's plans to return to the moon need a major overhaul, just as Space Station Freedom did when it was transformed into the International Space Station. NASA's plans to build two new launch vehicles, Ares I and Ares V, who's very foundation is based on stretched and upgraded space shuttle solid rocket boosters is folly. This will lead the United States down the same sort of dead end that the Saturn IB and Saturn V launch vehicles did, which is to say, Ares is going to be far too expensive to develop and operate and will not lead to a sustainable space program.

The United States has not one, but two, viable launch vehicles, Atlas V and Delta IV. Under prior NASA studies for the Orbital Space Plane, a manned space vehicle, these two launch vehicles were deemed suitable for "man-rating" to carry humans into orbit. There is no reason that they cannot be used to launch NASA's planned Orion manned space capsule.

Furthermore, NASA should not be spending billions on developing the huge Ares V launch vehicle when technologies such as in orbit refueling could be developed for far less. In orbit refueling would not only enable a manned lunar program to be implemented with existing US launch vehicles, but could involve any and all international partners to participate by delivering fuel and oxidizer to an orbiting fuel depot. Such an approach not only involves international partners, but involves them in a way that is not on the "critical path". Their involvement would allow the US to focus on developing and launching critical hardware such as the new manned lunar lander instead of developing the world's biggest and most expensive launch vehicle, the Ares V.

NASA does not operate its own airline to shuttle employees around the world, why should it operate its own launch services when such services can be purchased today from domestic providers? NASA should bolster the growing US launch industry by purchasing launches from them instead of shutting them out of its plans to return to the Moon.

I support Ares V as does Ms. Porco, an expert who calls for big rockets and big robots at WIRED magazine.

I think it is important for NASA to be independant enough to have its own designs, rather than be force-fed LVs just because some suit at an aerospace firm can't sell enough to the Air Force. Griffin is an actual engineer and needs to remain as NASA Chief.

Once again, 6 RS-68 engines on Ares V costs less than 21 upon seven of Boeings D-IV. Ares V is cheaper per pound, and allows outsized cargo. The monolithic telescope is simpler than the overcomplicated Webb contraption that is designed in such a complex fashion simply because of the shroud constraints of existing vehicles.