…when the major contractors are running down the lines of the ship:
According to industry officials present, former astronaut and Boeing Vice President Brewster Shaw, Lockheed Vice President John Karas and other executives met with the staff of powerful U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby to discuss creating a media campaign to counter Ares I critics and alternative ideas. Shelby, R-Ala., is a fierce protector of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which is designing the Ares rockets.
But the campaign never materialized. Instead, Lockheed and Boeing have softened their positions and even indicated some support for looking at alternatives.
Lockheed, which has a $4.5 billion contract to design and build the Orion crew capsule to ride on top of Ares I, now says it is “neutral” on which rocket takes its capsule into orbit.
In addition, it allowed United Launch Alliance, the company that Lockheed jointly owns with Boeing, to make a presentation to the Augustine Committee advocating its Delta IV rocket — now used to launch military and commercial payloads — as a cheaper, better alternative to Ares I.
When asked this week which rocket his company supports, spokesman Stephen Tatum replied: “Lockheed Martin is focused on building the best Orion crew exploration vehicle possible for our NASA customer.”
Diplomatically put.
Dead rocket walking.
I would think an existing Delta IV would have a huge advantage over most non-existent alternatives.
Griffin and Horowitz really took NASA and the U.S. on an expensive detour with Ares. Much time was lost. Maybe we’ll get a decent upper stage out of it.
Except that if it already exists, it doesn’t need to be planned, engineered and built — which means no new jobs, and thus no “stimulus.”
Traitor.
Horrors! This isn’t possible…don’t they know that the Delta IV isn’t Man-Rated(tm)?
According to rumours on NASAspaceflight.com, some Ares I people have been pulled off Ares I to study a 2-launch architecture with a scaled-down Ares V. Let’s hope it’s too little too late.
Maybe the “scaled down Ares V” bears surprising similarities to the NLS / DIRECT 3.0 concepts.
I am still a convert to existing sized launch vehicles + propellant depot, but that may not have enough jobs, jobs, jobs to be politically salable.
Guys, this is so crazy! How can you condone frittering away these designs? These are the most perfect launch vehicle designs put on paper (err, powerpoint), in the history of mankind! All it will take is a few more (tens of) billions of dollars in order to realize the hypothetical advantages of these completely untested paper designs. For all we know they could be so vastly incrementally better than existing, well-proven, operational vehicles that already perfectly meet our needs that we’ll rejoice at having spent half the cost of the Apollo program over twice its duration to have such fantabulous vehicles*.
* Assuming they will even work at all, which is still an open question.
The folks at NASASpaceflight have been drinking far too much of their own koolaid.
If Ares I goes, Ares V gets dragged down too.
I’m still betting we end up with a Delta IVH crew launch vehicle and a sidemount type HLV for a cargo launch vehicle.
The folks at NASASpaceflight have been drinking far too much of their own koolaid.
Some of them have, but this comes from a very down-to-earth non koolaid-drinking source.
Ares-V and Altair are looking to be on pretty shaky ground to. Flightglobal is reporting its being scrubed from scedule charts like EGLS, and NASA folks are talking more about Mars systems that were to be tested on the moon now being tested on the ISS.
Hell maybe they’ll get sensible and just upgrade the shuttles. It certainly would be cheaper to “upgrade then” into craft capable of being refueled in orbit and fly to adn from LLO then to develop Aries-I/V/Orion.