Daniel In The Lion's Den

I'm not so sure that it's gutsy as much as it is an act of desperation. Obama's had trouble getting anything passed, so it could be that he considers the NASA redirection the thing that has the best chance and is desperate for a signature item for his legacy.

The solution seems pretty straight forward to me, and there is no reason for the explosive reaction to the Obama-Bolden changes.

If anything deserved explosive anger, it was the lack of full support and concern by the previous Administration AND Congress, and the slow and exorbitantly expensive development effort being led by NASA. How can they even rationalize nearly a half billion dollars spent on the Ares 1X stunt? Something funny was going on there. The Administration and Congress should have been angered by the lack of NASA progress.

The goal is in large measure the support of jobs and salaries and support of the existing technical expertise. Continuing Shuttle can and should be supported on the basis of two things: (1) its all about saving jobs; (2) the knowledge and hardware we have invested in Shuttle today should be used as the basis for a derived heavy lift booster.

The Shuttle derived heavy lift booster should be supported and should form the core of the next major HSF development effort. (1) We have the people and expertise today; (2) whatever the next goals in space, we will need a heavy lift capability; (3) we have a heavy lift capability today, Shuttle, which can be optimized to carry more to orbit at lower expense; why throw away what we have ? Its like throwing away Saturn V all over again.

Take the $2 billion per year Shuttle budget and 2 of the $6 billion per year addition Obama proposes, and put it into maintaining Shuttle on a minimum operations team support approach, and put as much as possible into the Shuttle derived heavy lift development, including changing the operations people into R&D people. Minimum operations means a single team getting each Shuttle ready to fly in succession. One Orbiter/ET/SRB set in flow at a time. That means defining Shuttle flight frequency on the basis of the minimum number of personnel required.

Plan for 5 years for Shuttle derived HLV development. Begin studies of the follow on plan and tasks today but defer a decision on where to go next until 2014.

Orion should be discarded, which means terminating ALL of Constellation as we knew it. (1) It was never the right spacecraft for ISS support; (2) it is not optimized for most lunar or planetary mission architectures; (3) its too large for the existing EELVs and too large for the SRB derived booster, Ares 1. (4) its redundant with and competitive with Dragon and other systems under commercial development. It was never going to be ready on a schedule that made any sense.

Continue the development of commercial LEO capabilities with no more than $4 B/year.

Use ISS and expand its capabilities for supporting R&D associated with future lunar and planetary missions. This includes tests of advanced propulsion systems, tests of advanced power generation systems, research associated with partial-G and artificial-G, and tests associated with improving radiation protection.

Realign the entire NASA HSF organization around R&D and minimize operations to the maximum extent. Operations maintains the status quo. R&D increases future opportunities.

Devote more of the R&D funding into university grants and support from the academic community.

This solution is politically balanced and makes technical sense.

I've read about Daniel....Obama is no "Daniel".

Well I think that Barack is going to have to bring all of that highly-touted eloquence to bear on this one!
Sad though that this issue has become a political fight in a) a purely local milieu, b)only captures full media attention because of the participants and c) the real issues of the refusal to save money by modifying existing assets and keeping the workforce are ignored as the media anally catalog and "analyze" the blow-by-blow encounters. Whereupon the "in-depth analysis" will be provided only AFTER the decisions are irrevokably made: when it's far too late...

He started this space policy civil war, he fired the first shot, and he will lose this war.

I often agree with you, CessnaDriver, but civil war references are as inappropriate here as religious metaphors.

I hope Obama sees the opportunity here. He can swoop in, extend shuttle while rapidly building a true SDHLV (Direct/Jupiter 120/246), save 23,000 jobs in Brevard County alone, and keep America a leader in space. He can come out the hero if he just plays his cards right. After all, since no real plan was talked about, who's to say this wasn't the plan all along?

Media events don't usually amount to real debate. It'll be a question of who he allows into the discussion, what the agenda will be, and how open is he to alter his plan. If he stacks the room with the "get the gov't out of the commercial markets way" crowd then he'll leave with a warm glow. If he stacks the room with cancelled Constellation contractors, he'll hear nothing but a bunch of fat cats arguing for their own self interest. Hard to see where this forum will have any more effect than his health care media spectacle.

Now if they got a good mix of people with experience in launch and operating in a space system who locked themselves into a room until they got a plan that made sense, they'd have something. It wouldn't be nearly as fun to cover for the press, though.

A further point. Clearly both Bolden and Garver have failed to get the POTUS's message out in a form which allays this sort of grandstand play being required. Otherwise why all the fuss from various corners? I am very annoyed by the fact that nobody will quote verbatim from the original announcement but pitches straight in to put their interpretation of "Plan A" after offering select snippets to reinforce their personal opinion. Look at the recent confusion about "Plan B" that Bolden had to quash. I'd hardly call THAT reporting!

Daniel, huh? How appropriate.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upsarin

Obama missed several points he should have made. Most of the space workers would have lost their jobs even if Constellation had continued. Yet as long as Bush was in power there wasn't a peep from them. Bush wanted to completely eliminate the Space Station this year. Did that make sense? But now that Obama is in power and has admitted the obvious, that Constellation was unaffordable, they blame everything on him.

Obama should extend Shuttle, restart the Reusable Launch Vehicle, and drop the billion-dollar closing cost of Constellation, and the mission of Kennedy Space Center and NASA should be broadened to include a spectrum of practical efforts in research and development designed to provide practical benefits for America, not just the people who fly in space.