NASA Spaceflight has an interesting report on the status of the study.

It sounds about right to me. Retire Atlantis and make it a parts queen or a launch-on-need vehicle, and fly the other two vehicles once each per year. But at that low a flight rate, I wonder if the processing teams lose their “edge” and start to screw up? There’s an optimal flight rate for both cost and safety. Too fast and you make mistakes because of the rush, but too slow, and you get out of practice. And of course each flight would cost over two billion bucks, assuming that it costs four billion a year to keep the program going.

And as noted numerous times in the past, this doesn’t solve the problem of leaving US crew on the station. They still need a lifeboat of some sort. They discuss this as a “COTS-D Minus”:

…several companies have noted the ability to make available a lifeboat vehicle from 2012 (names and details currently embargoed due to ongoing discussions).

Clearly, one of those companies has to be SpaceX.

But this idea seems to never die:

‘There is some interest now in developing this (RCO) into a full mission capability, thus enabling unmanned shuttles to launch, dock to ISS, undock and land in 2011 and beyond.’

‘While that’s an interesting idea and would be a fun development project, we are working to understand the level of effort the program desires for this study.’

It’s not an “interesting idea.” It’s a monumentally dumb idea. There is little point in flying Shuttle without crew. The ability to fly crew is its primary feature. It’s far too expensive to operate to act as a cargo vehicle. If the point of the idea is to not risk crew, then we have no business in space.

It’s not just between Mike Griffin and OMB (and the White House?). Now (not that it’s anything new) there is a lot of infighting between JSC and Marshall over Orion and Ares:

Design issues for any new vehicle are to be expected, and correctly represented by the often-used comment of ‘if there weren’t problems, we wouldn’t need engineers.’ However, Orion’s short life on the drawing board has been an unhappy childhood.

The vast majority of Orion’s design changes have been driven by Ares I’s shortcomings – via performance and mass issues – to ably inject the vehicle into orbit. The fact that the Ares I now has several thousand pounds of reserve mass properties negates the suffering it has brought on the vehicle it is designed to serve.

Those penalties Orion had to endure could be seen at the very start of its design process, when the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) reduced in size by 0.5 meters in diameter, soon followed by Orion having its Service Module stripped down in size and mass by around 50 percent.

‘Mass savings’ would become one of the most repeated terms surrounding the Orion project.

One of the problems that the program had (like many) were caused by the intrinsic concept of the Shaft itself. If you’re designing an all-new rocket, it is a “rubber” vehicle in that one can size stages to whatever is necessary to optimize it. But in their determination to use an SRB as a first stage, they put an artificial constraint on vehicle performance. When it was discovered that the four-segment motor wouldn’t work, they went to a different upper stage engine. When this didn’t work, they went to five segments (which meant that it was a whole new engine).

During Apollo, von Braun took requirements from the people designing the mission hardware, and then added a huge margin to it (fifty percent, IIRC), because he didn’t believe them. As it turned out, they ended up needing almost all of the vehicle performance to get to the moon.

This program never had anything like that kind of margin, and now, at PDR 0.5, it’s already almost gone. So now they’re rolling the requirements back on to the Orion, demanding that the payload make up for performance loss by cutting weight, while also (probably, next year) requiring that it add systems to mitigate the fact that the vehicle is going to shake them like a Sherwin Williams machine. This will result in further loss of margin, redundancy and safety.

This is not a typical development path of a successful program. It is emblematic of one about to augur in.