Ares: Obsolete, and Cancelled, Prior to Birth

"We could get to the moon and do what?" said Dale Ketcham, a University of Central Florida professor who runs a think tank called the Spaceport Research and Technology Institute. "The taxpayers would really be ticked off: Sixty years later we go back and plant the flag and go home."

With this level of ignorance, this guy is qualified to be NASA Administrator.

The Ares I Launcher looks a lot like the Apollo Launch Umbilical Tower. If the swing arms are still available, an Apollo launch Vehicle could be displayed vertically on it. And since their are no new projects for the Vertical Assembly Building, the assembly could be housed there. Would be a good piece of history to preserve.

Would hate to see the VAB and other facilities get torched for scrap and shipped to China.

I think it just goes to show how great a job Constellation did in explaining what they were doing and why.

Is it just me, or do others think that a half billion dollars for this size a structure is out of line ?

"With this level of ignorance, this guy is qualified to be NASA Administrator."

Isn't that what the plan basically is/was? There's no base in the offing, just a twice yearly flight to the moon for a few days. At best.

"It's just a big old tower now," DeCastro said. "I guess you could sell it to SeaWorld or something and put a big ol' slide on it."

If the Merchant 7 do not use anything on the KSC side of the cape (pads, towers, VAB, LCC), as I would recommend they not, then perhaps, as DeCastro points out, there is another life for KSC pads, VAB, LCC, OPF's, etc. as a tourist destination.

I bet the folks at Disney would be happy to work with NASA to transform KSC into an interactive theme park.

Because if the Merchant 7 do indeed 'not set one foot on KSC property, or use it's resources' to create cost effective COMMERCIAL solutions, then who is going to foot the bill to sustain the facilities for their someday maybe eventual use?

U of Central Florida, is it Ivy League affiliated? If you ever visit you should go to their Nobel Prize museum, it's very uncluttered. Employers take not, UCF students must be quite a catch. I bet Professor Ketcham has a Master's degree - in science!

People seem to forget that the Moon was only an interim goal on the Constellation program on the way to Mars. While the goals of learning to "live off the land" at lunar poles seemed pretty farfetched it did, and still does, make sense as a proving ground for the systems needed to explore Mars or one of it's moons. It's nice to have such a proving ground only a few travel days away, rather than months and years away. Even the CxP logo portrays the moon as a stepping stone, although I may be misinterpreting it because it's so subtle.

What folks are missing is that Constellation's, or it's replacement program's, big contribution for exploration will be human access to BEO exploration. The launch platform can likely be used for whatever heavy lift launcher we produce someday. Thankfully the laws of physics aren't changing rapidly and we still live in this wonderful gravity well requiring large rockets to lift heavy payloads. While Constellation may end, it would be a pity to throw out any bits of infrastructure already developed just in the name of starting over. We are where we are. We need to find a path forward that builds on our investments wherever it makes sense. I imagine a MLP capable of servicing tall in-line, multi-stage rockets could come in handy at some point in the future. Unless, as Administrator Bolden suggests, we find a quick cure for gravity through new, near-term, low cost technology.

For some reason "pspudis" felt compelled to say:

"With this level of ignorance, this guy is qualified to be NASA Administrator"

While I do not support our withdrawal from "NASA Based" Manned Space Flight until Elon and the other commercial upstarts are ready to fly, it is truly amazing to see how fast Charlie Bolden has gone from "God" to "Goat" in the eyes of so many.

I am not enthralled with with the recent turn of events at NASA. As a "software lizard" there were always other job opportunities out on the horizon but I stayed put because I believed in Manned Space Flight.

I am more comfortable entrusting my life's dream to an old "Jar-Head General" then I am to some whiz-bang kid young enough to date my daughter.

1) There are lots of things wrong with this article.

2) This prof's comment is (unfortunately) right on.

The trajectory of the POR had us on a path that would get to the moon 10 year later than we claim...at a cost far beyond what was is SUSTAINABLE.

The whole scenario reminds me of the couple who spends all their resources planning their dream wedding. The day after the wedding (analogous to landing back on the moon) they finally pick up their heads and realize that they spent it all on the wedding and can't afford the house!

IMO the prof's comments (may) include an awareness that the fiscal situation of the US govt will likely be dramatically different in the not too distant future. A program that doesn't build into itself a SUSTAINABILITY that can help the agency survive just doesn't fly.

Hypothesis 1: Innovation is THE key to moving forward in the exploration on our solar system in the first half of the 21st century.

Hypothesis 2: Continuing the POR as is (more or less) will save jobs and political careers for a short time (~ 10 yrs) but will stagnate the exploration of space (at least in this country)for the next 40 or so years.

In the context of the preceding paragraph, Ketcham is saying that the funding profile doesn't allow us to do anything worthwhile by the time Constellation gets there. He's not saying there isn't anything worthwhile to do on the Moon at all.

I agree with the above comment completely.
As I recall reading, there were a number of things being planned in concert with the Constellation program including identifying landing sites for exploration and setting up bases and colonies and such.
Either we as a nation return to Luna and do the things we should have done as a continuation and follow up to the Apollo program or we let other nations take the lead and become a second rate space power in the process.
I stated before that I really didn't think that the Constellation design was a good one, there had to be a better one.
But if we abandon our lunar program (VSE) now other nations without internal bickering to obscure their path will succeed wile be fight and talk among ourselves.

The point Mr. Ketcham was making that the moon mission had been diminished form the colonizing and commercializing proposed under the original Vision for Space Exploration to the "Apollo on Steroids" approach of Constellation.

Constellation became a program whose rational was that we will spend a hell of a lot of money to get not very much - but we spend it in Alabama, Utah and Texas, so its all good.

The tower here is a great example. Boeing, Lockmart or SpaceX would have spent somewhere between $30 - $75 million to build a capable tower of this size. This thing is HALF A BILLION FREAKING DOLLARS!! This more that the entire rework from ground up of either complex 41 for Atlas V of complex 37 for Delta IV - including all of the launch control, vehicle processing, communications in addition to pad work.

Probably, only about $75 million was spent at Kennedy, the rest was for the PowerPoint & paper brigade.

Ares I was a horrible design, created to give business to ATK at the risk of astronaut safety. Orion's capabilities had been bled out by the Ares I inability to reach performance goals. There is no real heavy lift or lunar lander program that is currently in place.

Moving earth to ISS transit duties to Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX's Falcon and OSC's Taurus, and focusing NASA development resources on a heavy lift vehicle is the only way to have meaningful human exploration beyond LEO under any realistic budget scenario.

Too bad Charlie Bell is gone.

My question would be what is sustainable in the eyes of Obama and Bolden?

Without proper funding we can't afford a mission.
I can see us being stuck with an commercially run, ISS only, R&D focused program that is still kept a dollar short of reaching its true potential. Congress is no more bound to find money for Obama vision as it was for Constellation, no matter if it costs the same.

Now we're entering an era where the visible symbols of our space activity are being mothballed. There's no telling how that will sit with a public that is accustomed to the smoke and fire of manned spaceflight.
If they object to spending tens of billions with nothing to show for it, it likely wont be sustainable even at a reduced price.

Read this comment again folks. NASA spent more building this one tower than they have on the ENTIRE COTS program to date. You can quadruple the COTS program cost and the amount spent by NASA will still have been only 2X what this one tower cost and less than 1/4th of what has been spent on Constellation to date.

The reference to the cost of Constellation is relevant as the only quasi near-term use for the program is to deliver a 3-person crew to the ISS hopefully by 2015, and more probably by 2017 if the program continues.

If Constellation continues, I'm betting the total program cost by the time it flies will be on the order of $15B to $20B. And then they are only going to fly 2-3 times per year maximum! Assuming it only costs $15B to get flying, and ignoring ongoing operational costs (which will be at least $1B per flight), it will only take 98 Ares I flights to amortize the per seat development cost down to the $51M per seat the Russians are charging us now!

Where did the "$500 million" came from ?
The contract awarded to Hensel Phelps "includes an option for an additional Ares I mobile launcher. It is a firm fixed-price contract with a value of $263,735,000, if all options are exercised."

> Moving earth to ISS transit duties to Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX's Falcon and OSC's Taurus, and focusing NASA development resources on a heavy lift vehicle is the only way to have meaningful human exploration beyond LEO under any realistic budget scenario.

By splitting these efforts formerly in the Constellation program you will end up paying, and paying again.

I like your name but you are not true to it.

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" refers to the situation in which heroes must learn to trust each other so that they may work together to defeat a common foe.

Instead of cooperation or a coordinated effort you advocate separation.

Thanks for the sanity check.

I'm pretty sure the MLP was designed on the basis for Ares V use as well as Ares I.

"Too bad Charlie Bell is gone."

Yes, Charlie had an interesting collection of surplus NASA hardware. Once helped him refurbish a Redstone rocket for a museum in 1985. He would have, no doubt, found a use for all the surplus that is coming.

was this the "GFE" thing that was rushed into procurement, allegedly a "long lead" item, that didn't have a PDR and was grossly over-budget & behind schedule anyway?

or was it the (burned & demolished after 1X) Pad B?

unfortunately, it seems that Republican politics and twisted logic may have filtered down to the KSC CxP management.

are the (Griffin appointed) KSC center & deputy directors staunch Republicans?

Constellation is a program that would have been successful if it had received the political and funding support it required. Every President administraton since Nixon has only provided lip service to NASA. Presidents and the Congress always expected 500 billion in expectations from NASA; sadly, they only authorized $200.00 and only appropriate $1.95. Given this, of course Constellation was doomed for failure. But whose fault is it? NASA of course according to all the psuedo "experts".

Sad that in the analysis, that's all we did the first time. If we were less obsessed with just winning...

Ares was a bad idea from the start. Delta IV, made by the United Launch Alliance, can haul almost as much payload and has a proven track record of experience.

Government cannot perform operations and design spacecraft and launch vehicles as efficiently and as well as industry. Even back in the 1960s, NASA had no advantage over industry in launch vehicle technology. In fact, American industry, contracting to the Air Force for ICBM development, quickly learned from Wernher von Braun's rocket team and surpassed them.

NASA does still enjoy advantages in niche technologies that are exclusively for manned spaceflight. But overall nowadays, industry can design a better performing product, including being much safer, and can operate it less expensively. NASA should perhaps instead follow the example of the Air Force and foster development of new technologies, procure rather than design space vehicles, and oversee and specify solid requirements for flight safety. Or perhaps follow the example of the FAA and allow industry to operate the spacecraft as well, while retaining Mission Control.

But if the goal is to cut the cost of transport of materials to and from space, the current setup has been a miserable failure. Wernher von Braun promised a $100 per pound to orbit cost in 1968 dollars, which has been exceeded, adjusting for inflation, by a factor of 100. The reason for this from anecdotal experience is that NASA operates like any other civilian government bureaucracy. It is too rigid, political, and inefficient to be competitive with industry.

The private sector already has a taxi to space with a proven track record: United Launch Alliance.

Obama and Bolden should stick to their guns and go forward with their plan to privatize what has been the best example of socialism in the United States.

You are wrong. NASA's budget has been quite stable, and even Constellation received most of the funds it was promised. Griffin got a lot of them by raiding other NASA projects.

Orion and Ares were screwed up by poor technical decisions, and a lack of 'technical honesty' for most of their 5 year history. The Ares was never able to carry the payload that the program was counting on 5 years ago, and the Orion was going to turn out much heavier than the program estimated 5 years ago. The false technical parameters were due directly to a lack of proper and open technical discussion. Requirements were not firmly and appropriately established by the technical expertise that had cognizance, and costs spiraled out of control. And all that on a system which never required an SRB-based Ares booster from the start.

And from the larger scale picture, the Orion-Ares architecture really was not answering the 2004 Vision at all.

Anyone looking clearly at the situation as far back as 2006 knew that Ares I would never fly. When Dr. Griffin said "Apollo on Steroids" it was obvious that NASA had just pulled another "SEI".

Yup, and very obvious by 2007 when Altair started to run into trouble, and later in 2008 when all the lunar landing work pretty much ground to a halt, to eventually have funding deleted. At that point, VSE was gone.

The issues with CxP are quite similar to those in STS, and even in Apollo; STS had most of its flight elements deleted, and Shuttle had to become a do-everything system, making it extremely inefficient and unsustainable. Apollo was designed for a race, and the only piece of efficiency in the system was LOR, and the entire system was also unsustainable. Orion was somehow supposed to be an orbital taxi (which can be real cheap and light) and also an exploration vehicle (which needs lots of volume and capability), and thus ended up too big for one thing, and too small for the other. Worse, it was going to be dumped back on Earth at the end of each mission, and sent up again! Again, unsustainable, and with no destination, when the lunar landing was effectively lost before the new Administration came in and before Augustine looked at the mess.

The new vision, if it hopefully goes ahead, will help break us of of those institutional inefficiencies, and prepare us for long-term sustainable space exploration, not driven by single destinations and timelines, quick fixes, etc., and remove the effect of historical thinking.

Though a lot of CxP will be useful - the Orion-Lite repackage could do the orbital taxi work, and it looks like ISS may become the real saviour of human exploration. A Deep Space human S/C is going to owe a lot more of its heritage to ISS and Mir than to Shuttle and Apollo.

@warp:
"...institutional inefficiencies..."

bunch-o-theoretical-overedgeycated-perpetualstudent-hooey!
current NASA hsf practices are why the bigillion things that can go wrong - like "forgetting to send a command ala SpaceX" - don't happen in hsf

JO5H & moonman are correct:

"Anyone looking clearly at the situation as far back as 2006 knew that Ares I would never fly. When Dr. Griffin said "Apollo on Steroids" it was obvious that NASA had just pulled another "SEI"."
You are wrong. NASA's budget has been quite stable, and even Constellation received most of the funds it was promised. Griffin got a lot of them by raiding other NASA projects.

Orion and Ares were screwed up by poor technical decisions, and a lack of 'technical honesty' for most of their 5 year history. The Ares was never able to carry the payload that the program was counting on 5 years ago, and the Orion was going to turn out much heavier than the program estimated 5 years ago. The false technical parameters were due directly to a lack of proper and open technical discussion. Requirements were not firmly and appropriately established by the technical expertise that had cognizance, and costs spiraled out of control. And all that on a system which never required an SRB-based Ares booster from the start.

And from the larger scale picture, the Orion-Ares architecture really was not answering the 2004 Vision at all. "

"

Well said, very accurate.

Of course, I'm not talking about NASA being inefficient in that sense. Though I'd point out that there's a Shuttle sitting on the pad right now with an OMS HE2 Iso valve problem that was detected before roll-out, but where the paperwork process delayed mitigation/debug before the bird was on the pad, it was too late to fix. And now an orbiter will need to work in orbit with less margin. A potentially more worrying than a benign spin-start issue on the first true hotfire pad test of a new bird caused by a pad-specific software issue. Complex systems have complex failure modes. And I totally agree NASA may have more experience, and that experience will be important for commercial developers to learn, and for them to work with their NASA expert counterparts.

But that's not what I was talking about - I mean the architectural processes, often driven by government politics (and, as somebody who works in government politics for human spaceflight, we're all to blame), where we end up being pushed to build systems that are easier to build, cheaper to build, but have awful running costs. That's what makes things unsustainable. We've known for decades that there are better architectures, that need more up-front R&D, but are more sustainable. In this case, if you want to just get to LEO, you build a bird that just gets you to LEO, and then work on more advanced, purely in-space, systems that get you beyond BEO, with those systems staying in space.

Then you have low-cost (operating cost) through system fragmentation, and not low-cost through overly amalgamated system requirements. However, then you need to fight for the politics for the R&D to happen. Better architectures are often, initially, less politically sustainable, even though, eventually, more financially sustainable. That's why the sustainable lunar plans in the late 50's became the unsustainable Apollo, and the entire STS system got reduced to just a Shuttle, with none of the originally planned systems to reduce in-space overall operations cost, long-term.

However, we DO have ISS, and that knowledge, especially the (mainly Russian and European) know-how on how to build in-space modules, is going to be critical when we move from an Earth to LEO and beyond mindset, to an operating in BEO mindset. Whoever is advising the US President on this is doing an awesome job on long-term thing. Which may, of course, be an overeducated and academic point of view ;).

moonman, you are absolutely correct. I work for NASA at KSC on CxP and saw the horrific program management and systems engineering on this program. It was doomed to failure from the outset, mainly because Griffin highjacked ESAS and chose his personal architecture. I truly don't believe that NASA is capable of this type of development anymore because decisions are made for personal or political reasons. Had we chose to clearly define requirements, flow them down properly, and trade off concepts and choose an architecture that was requirements-driven, then maybe we could have had a chance. It's not that there wasn't enough money, there just wasn't enough money to do what Griffin chose for us to do. If you can't live within your means, you have failed as a program manager.