Explained, by Jeff Greason (it’s buried in the comments, so I thought I’d post it up front here):

A little disappointed in the debate above.

I’m going to try, one more time, to explain flexible path. It isn’t hard. You just have to read what we said rather than try to do Kremlinology on what you think we must have meant.

I’ll boil it down the same way that I explained it to policy makers.

* We want to go to Mars.
* We can’t reasonably go to Mars without more experience with long-duration missions.
* Long-duration missions can be done to Lagrange points, NEO’s, and Phobos/Deimos and they are all worthwhile missions in their own right.
* We can’t reasonably go to Mars without updating our experience doing manned planetary exploration.
* Manned planetary exploration would be done on the Moon, which is a worthwhile mission in its own right, and could be a source of propellant for exploration.
* The Moon vs. Mars vs. NEO’s is therefore a FALSE CHOICE; the only choice we have is what sequence we do them in.
* Therefore, the only reasonable way to proceed is to accept that we MUST plan to do all of these things and plan accordingly.
* Since the spacecraft, lander, and boosters/EDS’s are the expensive part, constrained budget says develop 1 or at most 2 of them first.

Now, the version of this in the Augustine report was:
* Do the boosters/EDS’s and spacecraft first
* Do buildup flights in LEO, Lagrange, Cislunar, NEO’s
* Do Lunar landings
* Do Mars
(whether Phobos came before or after Lunar landings really wasn’t clear, it depends on how the technologies shake out).

Look at the mission timeline in the report, under flexible path, and you see Lunar landings, NEO visits, and Phobos visits before Mars. Construing that as “abandoning the moon” or “don’t touch” requires one to either refuse to read the report, to assume we only meant part of what we said, or to be dishonest.

Today, as it seems the NASA budget may not support doing 2 elements at once, I would suggest we do one at a time:
* spacecraft
* then boosters
* then landers

Because that way we can begin the exploration sequence with spacecraft on existing boosters and build the (relatively modest) upgraded boosters we need for more agressive missions as we go.

Makes sense to me. But the “look but don’t touch” morons will continue to be confused. I’m sure that we’ll be discussing this this evening, on a panel on which Jeff and I will be on, at the conference.

This was kind of amusing:

On Sunday a group of Embry-Riddle students organized their own “Roadside Awareness Rally” about the new plan, holding signs along a Daytona Beach road with slogans like “Let Us Go To The Moon” and, bizarrely, “Constellation will REVIVE our WORLD’S ECONOMY!” (um, points for enthusiasm, at least.)

Constellation: like alcohol, it is the cause of, and solution to all of life’s problems.

Or at least NASA’s not counting on one:

NASA will pay $335 million to Russia for four round-trip flights to the International Space Station in 2013 and 2014 under the terms of a new deal announced today by the American space agency.

The contract extends previous agreements with the Russians that ensure the station can keep a six-member crew after NASA retires the shuttle this year.

I wonder what the termination clause is if there is a decision to extend?

Keith Cowing is reporting that a “compromise” is taking shape and will be what is announced at the Tax Day summit in Florida.

If true, the good news is that Ares, like Francisco Franco, is still dead. The bad news is that with the Orion lite, NASA will once again be competing against private industry for a viable commercial activity. I like competition, but as in health care, the notion of competition from a taxpayer-subsidized entity remains anathema, if not an oxymoron. Also as in health care, the solution is not “competition” from the government, but to set up a structure that forces real competition among providers.

Beyond that, I think that a a Shuttle stretch and a Shuttle-derived sidemount is a waste of money, and a quarter of a century too late. It looks mainly like a jobs program to me.

Which would be all right, if it’s what is necessary to get political support for killing off the Ares disaster. The problem is that the new plan doesn’t fit the budget. As John Shannon said, Shuttle extension costs a couple hundred million a month, and with a low flight rate, each flight will be well over a billion, and not particularly safe, because it’s probably too low a rate for the operations people to maintain their edge.

“Red” has his estimate of the additional cost of this, over at Clark’s place:

Even just the Shuttle/sidemount Block 1 will be about $13B assuming those numbers. Let’s say you could gather funds from the 2011 budget for it as:

$1.5B – from the 2011 budget Constellation transition
$1.5B – from the KSC modernization
$0.6B – from the Shuttle slip contingency
$3.0B – from the HLV and propulsion research line
Also assume $0.4B gets directed to it from really fast pre-2011 budget work.

That’s $7B, leaving a $6B shortfall, even without starting Block 2 (if needed), Orion lite, exploration craft, or systems to integrate with ISS.

The remaining big new budget items (assuming commercial crew is protected as Keith suggests) are (setting aside Earth observations and Aeronautics which I assume are off the table):

$5B – space technology
$7.8B – exploration demos
$3.0B – robotic precursors
$2.4B – ISS increase

Even that $6B would put a huge hole in that, and the $6B is just a start, using optimistic assumptions. Also realize that even Griffin’s Constellation had IPP (now hidden inside space technology) and LRO/LCROSS as robotic precursors, so you’d be getting close to Griffin-esque territory already.

That was the problem that the new budget was supposed to solve. My biggest fear (in addition to the crowding out of commercial) is that once again the technology budget will be sacrificed. I notice in Keith’s report that there are two players who aren’t mentioned — OMB and Congress. Where is the money going to come from?

Also, I wonder why Tax Day was chosen as the date for the summit. In addition to its conflict with the National Space Symposium, it doesn’t seem a very propitious day to be announcing an increase in discretionary spending on an agency whose public support is broad but shallow, in a year in which spending and deficits have risen to the top of the public concern.

[Update a few minutes later]

There’s a lot more discussion over at Space Politics.

Clark Lindsey has the T of C. I strongly encourage everyone to subscribe if you want to stay on top of New Space doings, and allow Charles to continue to do this. He was given a space journalism prize by the Space Frontier Foundation last year for a reason.