Clark Lindsey doesn't usually editorialize, but he does in this report:
Cooke:
- Powerpoint graphics showing Ares I/V, Orion, Altair
- Factors in selecting architecture include performance end-to-end, risk, development cost, life-cycle cost, schedule, lunar surface systems architecture.
- Implementation according to NASA institutional health and transition from Shuttle, competition in contracts, civil service contractor rules.
- Discusses the studies that justify the Constellation architecture that Griffin had decided on long before he came to NASA as director and long before the studies were done.
- Will get problems like thrust oscillation solved.
- NASA proposes to stay on course through a change in administrations. Surprise, surprise...
Emphasis mine. Are they actually openly admitting that Mike ignored all of the CE&R studies, and just did what he planned to do before he was administrator?
This was amusing:
The Coalition for Space Exploration shows a brand new NASA space exploration promotion video. Gawd. After the last panel I felt like killing myself. No problem. I can watch this video again and die of boredom...
He has some other pretty tart comments as well.
[Early afternoon update]
As Clark notes in comments, that reference to Griffin's plans were his words, not Steve Cooke's.
Hi Rand,
The part about Griffin coming in with his own plans was from me. I've now made that more explicit.
The whole Constellation thing drives me nuts. Can't believe this mess is going to get billions of dollars.
Griffin is amenable to reason. Remember how he sketched the side-mounted abort system, but actual studies persuaded him to select the current system. So, I can't help but think that if anyone was willing to argue DIRECT when it mattered (instead of post-factum as it is), NASA could've built a reasonable rocket and not the stick of horrors.
There was no one in a position to argue Direct (or anything else) when it mattered. When Griffin came in he set up a closed little group for a sixty-day study led by Doug Stanley, and they basically came up with the justification for what he already wanted to do.
Well, I'm glad I didn't subject myself to the torments of this session. Totally predictable.
Instead, I hopped on the Metro and went over to the exhibit of Afghani treasures that were hidden from the Taliban and other destructive forces over the last 30-odd years.
Wondrous objects, and the intermingling of civilizations from Greece and Rome in the west, and India and China in the east, can be seen as a precurser of the far more extensive mingling of cultures in our own day.
What a wonderful alternative to the mind-numbing drivel from the NASA Constellation mafia. But I am glad that they had a big enough block of time for that drek that I was able to get over to the museum. ha ha ha....