Downplaying Internal Doubts About Ares

"This does not indicate a lack of confidence in or support for the current program."
can I sell you swamp land in Florida ?

However do not twitter about this, Laughing.

JSC/MOD = lack of confidence e+1000000

Seriously, cheaper moon plans? Give me a break. This is the moon here - we're going to spending billions and risking lives - its not worth doing unless we're going to do it right. We've already proven we can get there. Unless we're going to stay this time, why even bother? And setting up a sustainable infrastructure should and will be expensive.

It seems that a Sidemount solution would also allow us to bring a shuttle out of mothballs in an emergency.

If a piece of space-junk or a meteoroid were to strike the ISS and make it unhabitable, taking a shuttle out of retirement on a mission to repair and reinhabit would make us international heroes.

After Challenger went down we had no way to launch many large, vital spacecraft. Many looked and found Saturn 5 rockets laying on their sides, rusting, and the tools to make new parts destroyed. Is that to be the fate of Discovery, Endeavor and Atlantis?

This will work. You can this and Ares V for the same price as Ares I and V.

What will it take to convince NASA to keep it simple and relatively cheap? For minimal risk and minimal development cost it's hard to beat Gary Hudson's concept using Shuttle main engines and external tank with no SRBs:

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/a_single_stage_to_orbit_thought_experiment.shtml

If NASA wants to do any development work, as opposed to simply buying Delta Heavy, Atlas V Heavy and Falcon 9 Heavy, this is their best bet. The days of blowing endless billions on in-house development and subsidies to ATK are over.

@becca
This is the moon here - we're going to spending billions and risking lives - its not worth doing unless we're going to do it right.

See you there with a glass of wine, playing with robots.

Billions into the worthless sucking sound coming from CxP
At the very least MSFC is with us not against the correct effort.

"It seems that a Sidemount solution would also allow us to bring a shuttle out of mothballs in an emergency."

Totally not viable. Once the orbiters are mothballed, the capability for flight will be gone. The people, GSE and knowledge will be gone.

Probably worthwhile to do a 90 day study, or maybe 180, to take a serious look at Shuttle-C vs. Direct and see whether there are significant differences in costs and capabilities. Either way, you then have a heavy lift capability within a few years, make use of many of the already well tested Shuttle components and more importantly keep a lot of the Shuttle workforce.

The big hardware hold up is still Orion. It needs serious redesign to optimize it for affordable earth to orbit travel. Once reconfigured to have it make sense for launch and return, companies ought to compete to see who can do it quickest. Maybe a fly-off is the best way.

My comment is, Shannon's presentation was as everyone says and reusing even more of the shuttle hardware than the Ares designs, then why is everyone saying pooh-poohing the Direct architecture which is to do the same thing but with an inline design? Shannon said the plan for instrumentation and flight control was to used existing shuttle hardware and software and this is the same thing that the Direct plan advocates.

The difference between the sidemount and the shuttle on flight control software, being that the whole aerodynamic shape changes from the shuttle, has to cause a change to the flight control software just as the in line Direct design would. So the question is, why go halfway with the sidemount instead of the Direct proposal?

If this vehicle can only launch 2 astronauts, it is not worth doing. It seems like we are moving backwards. Maybe NASA fall back position from this is to launch 1 person into low Earth orbit.

If we are going to the Moon, go there to carry out a mission that advances human exploration and development of space.

All we are getting is a jobs program to help certain Congressional districts.

The *crewed* version of the sidemount vehicle is litteraly suicidal... Bad, bad bad, bad bad bad!

Can't believe someone proposed this stuff. Sad, sad sad, sad sad sad!

"And setting up a sustainable infrastructure should and will be expensive."

If an infrastructure is expensive, then by definition, it will not be sustainable.

Why mothball the orbiters? Okay, they're getting old, they don't have an LAS, the TPS on the wings is made of glass and susceptible to foam debris hits... but most of the time they work fine. I agree they are too dangerous for indefinite use with a human crew but would it be impossible to fly a standard shuttle mission without a crew? The Russians flew Buran unmanned. We launch deadly weapons from unmanned drones. Why can't we just replace the shuttle pilot with robotic/remote control? If you remove the astronauts, their seats, spacesuits, food, water, air, CO2 scrubbers, toilet, microwave etc. and convert the forward compartment into a pressurized cargo hold, it would be possible to send up quite a bit of cargo in an old orbiter that's already been paid for. This scheme would use existing ISS logistic modules and the robotic arm and we'd recover the engines and orbiter for reuse. The existing shuttle maintainance facilities could be used as they are but with drastically lowered standards. If there is no crew on board, a slight chance that some obscure widget might fail isn't so important as it is when human lives are at stake. Does every dinged tile have to be replaced if it's just a cargo hauler? We need cargo capacity to fully utilize the ISS, even if we must rely on the Russians for crew transport for a while. It would keep NASA in the ISS game and it would be like recycling the orbiters. My uneducated guess is it would be faster and cheaper to put a remote control in an existing shuttle orbiter than to develop the side-mounted shuttle and it would buy time to get the Jupiter series developed. Orion could fly on an EELV.

How about them suicidal fighter piolts flyin on the side of them deathtrap jets?

NASA's managers are obviously very, very worried about their grand plans being flushed. And they're right to be worried, especially if the Augustine Commission is looking at realistic cost projections in relation to what's coming down the pike with the federal budget.

I wonder if they know something we don't? Is there a chance the whole dratted thing could be shut down in favor of a dramatically scaled-down mission -- and indeed program? Maybe abandon a Made-in-America project in favor of international cooperation?

Today's announcement is either a) incompetently bad spin-doctoring or b) a profoundly ominous sign.

My 2cents says Orion on EELV and "Not-Shuttle-C" will be the ticket. While not the ideal combination (if there even is one), politically and economically this pair keeps the most people/congress critters happy in the near term imho. Oh and its also technically viable. However putting crew on "Not-Shuttle-C" ruins every advantagous aspect of it and should be dropped. For longer term if even heavier lift is needed then look to 5 segment or filament wound case SRB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Booster#Filament-wound_cases) or the winner of a Direct vs Ares V trade.

I hope NASA understands that the side mount crew launch idea is an absolute non starter.

If they are serious about this "Shuttle C" reincarnation they need to look elsewhere for a different vehicle to launch crews. Falcon 9 could be a good alternative.

But if NASA wants one vehicle to do both heavy cargo lifting and crew launch they need to swallow their pride and give Direct the consideration it deserves.

Its annoying to think we could have gone back to doing lunar science at any time with the hardware we own, yet we choose to spend 30 years in low orbit... then when we can finally get the green light to go, they trim the mission back just to save a buck.

I don't think the government honestly cares about price. Its the dangerous politics of resuming lunar flights after they were canned in some misguided attempt to win the public's favor. That's the real problem.

Politicians haven't figured out how to trade moon science for votes and NASA is offering a less costly sounding package (but it still ain't cheap to the sensibilities of a street level person).

If you don't win political and public favor for moon missions you probably wont get the cash no matter how right the price may seem.
They should stick with the original plan and highlight big features like rovers, bases, ISRU and its use towards Mars and missions elsewhere. It may cost more, but people prefer to hear their government is doing great things.

With DIRECT and Shuttle-C, the argument is that with two mid-to-heavy lifter launches instead of 1.5, that we can deliver more capability to the moon. No argument here. It's the faster/cheaper part of the argument that I have a problem with. (aside from the fact that for the Shannon LOR-LOR option, we're going to need two mission controls instead of one.)

Also, if you're going to going with a Shuttle-C type architecture, then it make sense to me to locate the payload on the top of the ET, locate the engines on the bottom of the ET, and I don't care what you call it. There are definite benefits to this type of architecture, but let's not pretend it will be cheaper.

The question in my mind is, will the added delay and potential added cost of this change in direction be more detrimental to NASA and the manned space flight program than the current CxP plan? ...any more or less likely to be canceled in 2012-2013?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it's totally FUBAR, sometimes it is better to fight/suffer through your mistakes and re-evaluate after the dust settles. There's no way the ARES-1/Orion will have any part in getting anyone to Mars anyways.

Scrolling quickly through these comments, I see that there are a lot of negative views. I agree with them! On a personal note, I've been working on an even less expensive idea where we can use a giant catapult to launch our astronauts into space. Anybody want to fund me?

I thihk we should all realize we're never going back to the Moon and it's delusional to think we are. Congress and the Administration don't support any effort to go back and the Augustine Commission is just to provide cover for them to axe the whole thing. Such a pity. Oh, all the viewgraphs that have been made of conceptual missions are kind of pretty though.

Its not very clear why the side-mount concept would limit lunar flights to just two astronauts and what this has to do with a Moon base and whether this related to the size of the Orion or the size of the lunar lander?

John Shannon needs to provide more details.

Ken,
I read somewhere that NASA invented a Kevlar reinforced foam that would pretty much eliminate foam debris? Maybe we just keep working hard on Shuttle/Shuttle-C until we get it right? The engineering work required to keep hardware/software sustainable for decades is what is missing in a moon colonization effort anyway. Get rid of all the powerpoint engineers and begin building the discipline engineering workforce of the future..."we can fix anything!" Can do spirit with lots of ground truth in nursing our existing infrastructure first. The mechanical engineer's dream...fighting entropy.
....hard at work.

"My uneducated guess is it would be faster and cheaper to put a remote control in an existing shuttle orbiter"
No, it wouldn't. The avionics upgrade would take just as long. The orbiter is very dependent on the crew for rendezvous and docking. Also the arm is not made to be remotely controlled.

Quote:

The *crewed* version of the sidemount vehicle is litteraly suicidal... Bad, bad bad, bad bad bad!

Can't believe someone proposed this stuff. Sad, sad sad, sad sad sad!

If what you are saying is that escape is not a option, You are wrong. What would be needed is the tower for part of the flight profile, and jeto assist during later portions of the flight. Take a look at the gemini abort methods, (- the ejection seats. (Mach V with Your hair on fire, (LOL))).

Jokes aside, the only (3) things that would need to be addressed are:

1. The aerodynamics between the tank and tower at transonic.

2. The center of gravity issues, (That will be a long tower, (We don't want to revisit the shuttle ballast issues)).

3. The weight, placement, and config of the jetos on the base or side mount of Orion.

The main part of the whole Shuttle C redo that bothers me is throwing away main engines, (Just like direct). It would do for a gap filler program, but we need something like a reusable Sea-Dragon.

There has to be a way to recover and re-fly the propulsion components of the stack. What ever happened to a follow-up on what Musk used to say about the Falcon 9 being recovered for refurbish/re-flight? That seems to have been dropped now from the space x talking points over the last (2) years.

The Saturn V first stage was also designed with the intent of recovery, (No flight test). We should push for Shuttle C if it is the only affordable path, with a eye towards crew/cargo safety and future recycle of engines.

Carl

The shuttles themselves are too labor intensive and expensive to keep flying, even unmanned. The cargo carrier is expendable. It also allows a more flexible payload configuration than the 15x60 foot cargo bay.

The Shuttle-C concept would also again allow the possibility of leaving the spent external tanks in orbit, to be collected and assembled into a large orbital facility. Not that I believe that will happen, NASA never liked the idea. It could tie in, perhaps, to the lagrangian point fuel depot schemes for lunar operations; it is after all a fuel tank.

Re-use of the tank is probably pie in the sky, but the cargo architecture alone has great efficacy in its evolutionary approach.

Everyone who thinks that the side-by-side Shuttle stack was so good a design concept that we want to do it all over again for Orion raise their hands.

No matter what the LAS configuration, would an Orion in a sidemount Shuttle configuration stand any chance at all of surviving a Challenger-type accident where the ET gets immolated almost immediately?

To all the readers here, realize that this sidemount carrier concept is being looked at right now as replacing the Ares V component of the current Constellation baseline architecture to follow the Shuttle retirement. Even if proving to cost less, which would not be difficult to show, the real matter becomes does it cost less enough to fit into a likely NASA budget profile for the next decade, with ample margin and uncertainty thrown in?

The situation has changed since ESAS in 2005. Back then the term “design to cost” assumed a budget, around which costs were played, that extended out in an inflationary mode. It is unlikely most federal agencies in the next decade will be free of budget pressures, resulting in flat profiles as word of "freezes" goes around OMB, regarding all discretionary spending agencies. In practice, as some items of cost inevitably cost more one year than the next, then a freeze will be a cut in purchasing power those years. In addition, there may be years that there are real cuts in discretionary spending, again a result of decades of accumulated national debt, requiring monthly interest payments out of the federal coffers to service that debt, combined with the medicare and social security situations.

So, this is not about what is just cheaper, but about "design to cost". The budget is once again being given, somewhat known. Elements of the longer term fit of that budget, such as leaving ample room for R&D or future product developmental efforts, and the ISS, are also known.

The matter of the sidemount may come down to the simple question, can we afford TWO vehicles, one for crew, another for cargo, operating at the same time, not forgetting any lander, for Beyond-Earth-Orbit (BEO) possibilities? Again, the matter is not requirements such as "global lunar access" or "120 day stay". These requirements are secondary and will be derived as outputs of comparing those approaches that are similar enough in meeting the prime requirements. Prime requirements will be what they should always have been, the affordability near term, such as peak funding, the sustainability long term, such as the recurring transports production and operations leaving ample funds for space systems R&D, space systems product development (Constellation is this today), and the ISS (likely indefinitely for planning purposes).

Any solutions are all interim solutions. The interim nature is a given, but the saving grace is keeping the emphasis throughout the life of the program to be affordable on a recurring basis, meaning yearly production and operations. By being about what Shuttle costs, there will be funds left over to pursue the longer term advanced solutions that will truly advance access to space.

To - jefftracey - your mention of the airbreather depends on this interim solution resulting in a recurring yearly production and operations cost that does not consume the whole human space flight budget minus ISS. No development funds (about $3B today, called Constellation) nor space systems R&D funds (about $500M today, called advanced capabilities) would otherwise be available to do airbreather work.

To - Dennis Wingo - please realize as stated before that a single vehicle solution, sidemount or otherwise, is a very different beast in term of cost than a sidemount plus Orion Ares I solution. ESAS assumed the synergy in effort of two vehicles and these cost savings evaporated as the designs matured and diverged, a result of an organization that has not yet taken to heart cost vs. performance. The engineering and scientific culture can take an Orion Ares I plus a sidemount and make it as costly as the current architecture quite easily, due to a near phobic disregard of matters of costs near and especially far term. It's more difficult (but possible) to generate such high near and far term costs as Cx was estimating if dealing with a single combination use vehicle. So these topics of the sidemount often talk past each other, as some are with and others without Ares I.

To - Phil B - about the bickering being counterproductive. You point out accurately the budget cuts that are coming, inevitably. The bickering may be excused in considering that if the committee backs Constellations current architecture and Constellation works some presentation about how even at the lesser budget it's all possible, the risk is that NASA gets stuck in LEO again with just a small Ares I rocket. There will be nothing else for much time to come. The error in assuming the bickering is bad is assuming its ill intentioned. The internal strategy of Cx is the knee-jerk reaction of seeing a budget problem and battling for budget. Leadership in NASA has come to see this as a yearly exercise in lying, to sell the programs they want, then apologizing, then asking for more money. The cycle then repeats. If the cuts really are long term and inevitable this strategy will result in Ares V being killed some years hence as reality sinks in, vs. now when only some are quite certain this budget situation is just as real. There are many in NASA who want to see Cx stopped as it will either give us (a) a small rocket and nothing more as real budgets evolve, well into the 2020’s, or (b) an expensive lunar architecture that fly's un-often and consumes in it's yearly cost all space systems R&D, space systems product development, and eventually the ISS. No seed corn. Nothing beyond these interim solutions. Nothing sustainable. No step possible to something beyond a Shuttle derived system. The later is so even getting the relatively generous ESAS/2005 budgets, which Cx cost estimates have already exceeded amply.

@HardWork
I had not heard about this Kevlar-reinforced foam, is there a public web site where I can read about it? It sounds like a good idea. If a reusable cryogenic tank is ever to be developed, such a substance might be essential.
Re: “Get rid of all of the powerpoint engineers” and “nursing our existing infrastructure first”. I agree, two thumbs up.

@me

"No, it wouldn't. The avionics upgrade would take just as long. The orbiter is very dependent on the crew for rendezvous and docking. Also the arm is not made to be remotely controlled."

I freely admit that I am not a NASA rocket scientist, but your assertions bugger belief. You suggest it would take as long to develop an unmanned control system for our orbiters as to develop the whole shuttle-C? Give me a break! The Soviets flew Buran unmanned. That was more than 20 years ago! The shuttle orbiters are fly-by-wire machines with computer inputs, downlinked telemetry and lots of oversight from mission control. They’re already half-way to being remote controlled. And if Americans can’t build an automated docking system, we can buy one. If we can’t buy the technology from the Russians, we can buy the Russian technology from the French. Also, the robotic arm is already remote controlled. The astronaut working the arm is on the other side of a window. Anyway, I don’t propose to control the arm from Earth. After the cargo shuttle docks with the ISS, a human can board the orbiter and do the job.
My point is that decommissioning the orbiters and sending them to a museum in pristine condition seems wasteful. If the orbiters can fly without a crew, they can be used for experiments that might just teach us something. A crewless shuttle orbiter would probably carry about one third as much cargo as shuttle-C but the development costs would surely be much lower. Heck, we could recycle old shuttle powerpoint presentations, just white-out the windows.

@Carl:

This vehicle does not stand a chance for a properly functioning LAS. Chances of direct contact with the tank on abort are so large that there will be no way to mitigate them. Remember that the SRBs would still be firing as you abort. And when the capsule starts getting away from the stack a shock wave will be created off the nose of the tanks interacting with that of the LAS tower. Shock interaction usually is not a good thing for controllability.

In addition, look at the length of the launch tower of the LAS. This thing will bend so much that to make it structurally sound it'll have to be very, very heavy. The relation between CG to CP on the current LAS is (was?) so bad that it makes it very unstable (don't know if they fixed the thing). When all the propellant depletes on abort, very quickly mind you, it'll be a nightmare to control it.

Most hypersonic vehicle require ballast just to make them trim on entry at the proper angle of attack, including Shuttle and Apollo and most likely Orion. So ballast will be there as well which will not help on the initial part of the abort.

Look, it is absolutely not comparable to an ejection seat where thrust is initially imparted in the direction transverse to the vehicle trajectory. You would have to have additional rocket motors to push it away from the tank which means firing into the tank!!!!

As to ejection from airplanes I believe someone even survived an ejection from a high and fast flying SR-71 but it was not pretty (Air&Space Mag. I believe) and also from a Mig-25 (but I am not sure about that one). So I am aware you can eject at fairly high speed. But I still stand by comments about the darn concept. The dynamics of such a system would be insanely difficult to solve.

Now of course if you do not have a LAS then most of this is moot. BUT they showed a concept with one... Hence the insanity of it.

And of course the foam debris strike on ascent would have to be worked out...

Just wondering how many astronauts would fly the darn thing...

PS: Note the SRBs are indeed recovered but nobody can claim they are re-usable, save for the casing... If I am not mistaken the recovery and refurbishing of those things is more expensive than building new ones...

To: NASA Engineer

Wow, thanks for your informative post. I have one question: do you happen to know what the folks at NASA are projecting in terms of budgets over the next ten years?

I guess I'm wondering whether they're expecting massive cuts. I certainly am ... I expect a massive budget crunch to hit Washington in the next year or so.

If this really is the case, the return to the moon, missions to mars, all this goes out the window. So what becomes NASA's mission? Keeping a toehold in space until the finances improve?

Common Sense,

Please review this link:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4203/ch2-5.htm

I understand that the rejection of ejection, (LOL). Wally Schirra did "not" pull the handle on Gemini 6 and saved the launch.

The early shake down shuttle flights used ejection seats. We saw during the challenger accident that the crew cabin survived and if better shielded, jeto assist/stabilization, and parachute for recovery, would have allowed for survival of the crew. The radical change in aerodynamics of the exploding tank is what broke apart the orbiter.

The problem of exiting a fire ball has been studied in great detail, (Paper and reality). I think we can come up with a workable system, if Shuttle C needs to be Human rated.

The Escape tower may not be the way to go. But the crew could be shielded and be provided with a power abort system that will supply a acceptable survival %.

Folks have been punching out of disintegrating high speed cockpits from the early days of jet flight. What will make the difference is the higher speeds after the craft breaks the sound barrier. We will need to do something like the B-58 hustler pod, (with a TPS of it's own). See this link for a blast from the past:

http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/convair/Aero36G5.htm

Carl

Another alternate version of a man-rated shuttle-C would be to place the Orion crew module and service module on top of the current shuttle fuel tank (joined with an appropriate spacecraft adapter) while the orbital lunar transfer vehicle would be housed above the side-mounted shuttle engines.

Once in low Earth orbit, the Orion and OTV would separate from the fuel tanker and then dock with each other before heading towards lunar orbit to meet with the lunar landing vehicle already launched from the Shuttle-C heavy lift vehicle.

This would be a safer man rated configuration for the launch abort system than the current side-mount concept.

So this concept would be sort of a hybrid between the Shuttle-C and the DIRECT concepts, except it should be cheaper than DIRECT since it wouldn't have the added developmental expense of moving the SSMEs underneath the fuel tank.

http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/

Two man crew = Gemini on steroids!!!

Quote:

Two man crew = Gemini on steroids!!!

I am all for building the Big G! It was a great idea for LEO.
It only made it to the mock-up stage.

The only thing I think would be a problem would be the skip re-entry profile from lunar missions. If I remember correctly the shape and heat shingles/cladding would have been the problems requiring that profile.

Put the Orion on the side of the stack with the B-58 type escape pods.

And bring back the para-glide with skids for landing/recovery.
With today's tech. the control problems should be easier to work out.

Love MOL, Big G, and SSTO Gemini variants. What a great time it was for brain/barnstorming.

Carl

@Carl:

Remember, I was only addressing the concept shown above. Note I am even saying there may not have to be a LAS... Especially when it makes things even more dangerous.

Escape pods have been studied and abandonned in light of the additional weight. Some were even proposed for Shuttle. Sometimes "better" really is the enemy of "good enough".

I think NASA can do a lot better than that contraption they showed. It does not reflect well on them that this is the only thing they can come up with.

What is the concept behind re-use of Shuttle hardware again? This is the driver and MAJOR flaw behind the current architecture and as long as we keep it it'll doom the overall plan.

Someone even suggested to fly the Shuttle without a crew. I would even take that as a better and less expensive concept!

As for Challenger, the flowfield pushed the vehicle away. So a LAS may not have been necessary... Again, I am only saying that to put a LAS on anything and everything does not make any sense if it has not been worked out just as in the sidemount vehicle shown here. And it clearly has not been worked out.

Hi Bill Davis,

Re: “The shuttles themselves are too labor intensive and expensive to keep flying, even unmanned.”
You might be right… but has a real study of this idea of an unmanned cargo hauling shuttle orbiter ever been done? I doubt it! My assertion is that a lot of the most expensive between-flight maintenance could be eliminated if we accepted a greater risk of loss of orbiter. If the risk was loss of a museum piece, instead of loss of 7 of the most talented people in the world, maybe we could use that set of tires one more time and maybe that dinged tile could be patched rather than replaced etc. etc… So what if a shabby maintenance schedule leads to an orbiter burning up on reentry? Just because the orbiters cost 2 billion dollars, you shouldn’t think of one as being worth 2 billion dollars, especially if its next mission is to increase tourism at the Kansas Cosmosphere. (The Cosmosphere is an excellent museum and would be a great resting place for one of the orbiters. It’s worth visiting just to see their collection of Russian space hardware.)

Re: “Re-use of the tank is probably pie in the sky, but the cargo architecture alone has great efficacy in its evolutionary approach.”
I’ll say re-use of the tank is pie in the sky. Shuttle-C won’t even allow for reuse of the SSMEs! But it sure would be cool if the external tank could be reused in space. It would be great to have a fuel dump in LEO and if an external tank could be softly landed on the moon it could be used to store fuel, oxygen, water or be used as a habitat that is quite a bit larger than an Airstream. It’s a crying shame to accelerate the fuel tank to a speed high enough to allow it to coast all the way to the southern Indian Ocean and not put it into orbit for later reuse. But that’s way it goes. Right now there isn't a need for large empty tanks in LEO. As for an evolutionary approach: I agree wholeheartedly. (As long as there aren’t too many bizarre mutations along the way, like: changing from a 4-segment SRM to 5.5-segments, having to develop a practically new engine called J2-X instead of using J2-S etc.)

Well I don't know of all the details and stuff but I figure we will never get to the moon unless we build something big. Big as in Saturn V or Ares V (Atlas, Titan, Delta, Falcon are not considered "big").

Saturn V had the biggest slice of the Apollo budget pie. It had to work, everything else followed. If it didn't then everything else wouldn't matter, i.e. Soviet N1 development.

Multiple smaller launch vehicles that assemble in orbit just doesn't seem right. Like Apollo, if you want to send something the size of a minivan to the moon, you need something the size of a skyscraper to get it there.

@common sense

"What is the concept behind re-use of Shuttle hardware again?"

The side-mount concepts cost less than $7 billion while the Ares1 and Ares V concepts cost more than $40 billion. So its about money in a time when there's a lot of talk about reducing Federal government spending.

Ken,

"You suggest it would take as long to develop an unmanned control system for our orbiters as to develop the whole shuttle-C? Give me a break! The Soviets flew Buran unmanned. That was more than 20 years ago! The shuttle orbiters are fly-by-wire machines with computer inputs, downlinked telemetry and lots of oversight from mission control. They’re already half-way to being remote controlled. And if Americans can’t build an automated docking system, we can buy one. If we can’t buy the technology from the Russians, we can buy the Russian technology from the French"

A. The shuttle avionics are archaic. The mass memory unit is a tape drive. The computers only have 286K memory. To automate it would be like starting over. All the 100's of circuit breakers and switches would have to be rewired to add remote controlled switches. Why do you think there is all the oversight by mission control, because the avionics isn't smart enough to do something about it and it takes a crew member to act on it.

B. So what if Buran flew 20 years ago, it was designed from the beginning to fly unmanned, the shuttle wasn't, especially docking

C. The russian automated docking system won't work with the shuttle. Wrong end of the station and the shuttle thruster configuration is too complex for it and it won't work for a shuttle type approach. The shuttle would require a brand new unique system.

Making the shuttle automated is just like any aircraft avionics upgrade, it takes 3-5 years.

Right now Ares 1 would only fly twice a year. You can ramp up to 6 times a year but that requires 18-20 months advance notice. Based on that cost each Ares 1 flight is 1.3-1.5 Billion (total reoccurring and non reoccurring cost). It drops down to $.8-1.0 billion if you fly 6 times a year.
You can more with a shuttle system than Ares 1.

What else could NASA fly with that amount of money?

Shuttle C, EELV?

Yes, Cost effective for crew. Ares V can be cost effective for very large cargo.

It's about the money. Remember, what gets picked, funded and built will fly for the next 50 years.

Could you see Shuttle C flying until 2050+ or EELV?

I could.

NASA should buy rides on rockets and build spacecraft. The USAF never designs a fighter (or a rocket), but the sure buy some great ones.

Atlas V is also a great rocket with a great Russian engine, don’t rule it out.

Musings by an (admitted) amateur):

My hope is that if the new vehicle continues to have foam-shedding problems, the fiberglass BPC would protect the CM of Orion. Perhaps fiberglass is not as brittle as reinforced carbon-carbon (preventing a fracturing of the hull of Orion, a la the holing of the RCC on Columbia).

Thanks to those posters who have expressed concern about the aerodynamic interactions of the LAS and the ET at certain velocities, thus pushing Orion into the ET in an abort. Maybe that alternate LAS design (not a tower, but a snubnosed hood), soon to be test-flown, would work better, or abort motors underneath Orion.

I wonder if using RS-68s, instead of throwing away 3 expensive SSMEs each flight, would, over the life of the program, compensate for the expense of man-rating RS-68. I also wonder if the payload could be increased significantly by using a better engine than the J-2X in the upper stage.

Are they serious about lowering the crew complement to 2 on Orion? Is that just for the lunar variant, or for LEO as well?

Only a crew of 2 to the lunar surface? So much for "Apollo on steroids." The proposed LM Taxi of the Apollo Application Program could have delivered 3 crew to the lunar surface.

We NEVER should have stopped building Saturns!

@Marcel F. Williams:

I know I was just being "facetious"...

I forgot to add, in adddition to the aerodynamic issues, that the LAS firing into the tank the way it is shown is also an interesting concept: So freaking bad I still can't believe it...

I was just comparing the sea level thrust of the RS-68 to the SSME:

RS-68: 650K lbf.
SSME: 712K lbf.

Looks like a RS-68 propelled side-mount HLV would require a new "boattail" that would accommodate 4 engines, or would need to use 5-segment SRBs. I wonder which would cost less in development costs? Thiokol has already test-fired at least one 5-segment SRB.

Again, I'm an amateur, and have no agenda. I would welcome any feedback and/or debate. If I could ever find a way to make a living at doing such "research," and from learning from y'all, I would be the happiest man on Earth!

The unwillingness of the NASA establishment to build and fly Shuttle-C has always baffled me. It is an HLV right out of the box.

It ticks all the right boxes, including the box it doesn't tick - the one labelled [ ] Hangar Queen Money-Pit Orbiter.

Put the CEV on top in the meantime if you must, but fly Shuttle C.

Bob Shaw

@ Marcel Williams - "The side-mount concepts cost less than $7 billion while the Ares1 and Ares V concepts cost more than $40 billion. So its about money in a time when there's a lot of talk about reducing Federal government spending."

Just with development cost of the two Ares rockets, NASA could purchase 160 EELV launches and place 4000 tonnes in LEO. That's 10x ISS's mass and the launch cost ignores economies of scale inherent in that size purchase. Surely 4000 tonnes is enough to build a huge moon base or several stations in interesting places across the Solar System or any other plan.

If NASA has to operate it's own launch system, Shuttle-C has always been the best HLV option. With likely funding any HLV may be off the table.

There are reasons that so many launchers standardized at roughly 20-30 ton IMLEO. It's the best economic sweet spot for likely payloads. Prove in the market the need for a 500kg spaceplane or 100t HLV not @ tax payer expense.

One of the main reasons the current Shuttle will be grounded next year is that the side-mounted human launch configuration is dangeous. The NASA presentation by Shannon shows a side-mounted configuration that appears to be loaded with technical flaws. The safest way to launch humans into space with current technology is on the top of the vehicle. It is not just about money, it is about safety for the crew. We have lost far too many fine people in the space program.

The Direct 130 and its other configurations look like they can do the job and get it done within a short period of time and within a reasonal budget.

For you na-sayers out there that think the Commission is a ploy to kill the American space program, you need to look at the interest expressed in this blog. America will not let the space program be killed.

I agree that a top-mounted manned spacecraft is inherently safer than a side-mounted spacecraft. In the one incident in which a LES/LAS actually saved a crew, the Soyuz booster burst into flame a fraction of a second before the abort system functioned; if the Soyuz had been side-mounted, it would have been consumed (unless the BPC would have been an effective fire-barrier for the time needed).
However...the two failure modes which caused fatalities in the existing STS are well-understood. As far as I know, we don't have blow-by from the SRBs anymore. And my understanding of Challenger (which may be wrong) is that the crew would have survived if the crew compartment had been aerodynamic (to prevent tumbling) and had had recovery parachutes.
As has been pointed out in another post, the heat shield of Orion cannot be damaged in a side-mounted configuration, like Columbia, since it is protected by its SM.
These historical examples, of course, do not preclude other unanticipated failure modes. But, maybe a side-mounted Orion with a LAS (designed not to get sucked into the fuel tank by a shock wave, of course) would be safer than STS by an order of magnitude, as asserted by the Shannon team.