I hadn’t noticed this before, but apparently Mark Wade has put up a little history of the CEV and Constellation program, which describes how Mike Griffin’s NASA, for whatever reasons, completely ignored the advice of its contractors, to whom it had paid millions of dollars to provide potential solutions, and came up with an architecture that, in “synthesizing their suggestions,” bore no resemblance to any of them. Of course, they were just doing their job, trying to follow the dictates of the Aldridge Commission (including affordability and sustainability, and synergy with national security), which NASA seems to think no longer matters.