There’s a long comment over at NASA Watch that pretty much sums up how we got to where we are today:

Let me tell you how NASA works. Engineers in the hallways lament that they can’t believe we are designing a rocket and spacecraft this way….with very little redundancy in critical systems, no weight margin, severely restricted capabilities from what we initially wanted out of the system. And then these same engineers enter the meeting room and none will jump on the table and beat their fists and tell others what they *really* think. All of the design reviews come off swimmingly because everyone is drinking the kool-aid. You end up with a “forward work” chart a mile long but everyone smiles and exits stage left.

In a nutshell you have tremendous group-think within NASA. Why do they behave this way? I will give you a hint….its because they don’t want to rock the boat and they all want to collect their paycheck with a minimum of fuss and they all want to be promoted on schedule – many, many people think that “everything will just work itself out”.

So the answer to the initial question is that in the 1960s the people designing the hardware had real world experience building missles and they were not afraid to speak up and be heard – and they had leaders who were experts in their field – who knew what they were doing.

Today, none of the Cx leaders have any such experience. All of that experience died years ago when those people retired.

And it’s allowed to be this way, because space isn’t important. All that’s important are the jobs.

…strikes back:

The video itself is perhaps a bit subtle: it’s arguing for staying the course in Constellation, but doesn’t hit the viewer over the head repeatedly with that message. The closing slide asks viewers to contact the White House and Congress and “tell them you DO NOT Want to ‘Take a Chance’ with the U.S. Human Space Flight Program.” (capitalization and punctuation in original.) The information on the YouTube page, though, is rather more blunt: “Although a thorough review was conducted four years ago—and a direction chosen, contracts awarded, tests conducted, and rockets built—the Augustine committee wants to stop work and do something new,” it claims. “This will widen the gap between the retirement of the shuttle and its replacement vehicle, waste billions of dollars and threaten Americas [sic] presence in space. You can STOP this.”

It’s going to be an interesting fall for space policy and politics.

So, Orion supposedly passed its Preliminary Design Review (even though it never really made it through a System Requirements Review, and the requirements are still all over the map as a result of the Ares 1 problems and other issues). But I don’t buy this:

If Orion’s companion rocket — dubbed Ares 1 — is spiked in favor of another rocket, then any Orion mission would be delayed by up to two years so engineers could fit a new rocket to the capsule.

That possibility looms large. Ares 1 faces mounting technical and financial problems and an independent presidential panel said this summer that it would be impossible for Ares 1 to meet its goal of a first mission in 2015 without a funding increase of tens of billions of dollars.

Given these funding pressures, it’s uncertain when Orion could be ready for a new mission if a new rocket is chosen.

This is just more FUD by Hanley to try to save Ares 1. It is six years until 2015 (and they already had less than a 35% confidence of hitting that date even with Ares 1). Sure there will be some changes to the vehicle if they switch over to an affordable and safe launcher, but there is no reason in the world that those changes would have to add two years to an already long schedule. I’d be curious to see the project schedule and critical path.

[Afternoon update]

“Rocketman” has a plausible alternate theory:

Viceroy Hanley, standing on one leg with his fingers crossed behind his back, came as close as he’s going to admit the real status of Orion at it’s PDR. He’s at least two years behind schedule. How do we know that?

“It’ll take up to two years to fit a new rocket to the capsule,” he said. Design changes to accommodate weight and size differences are required he says.

But at least one EELV provides more mass margin than the corndog does.

As I note in comments, playing “schedule chicken” like this is a win-win for him — either he gets to keep Ares, or he gets an excuse for his schedule slip. But only if he keeps his job, and someone doesn’t call him on it. If I were Bolden I’d demand a briefing showing (as already noted) the assumptions behind his claim.

[Update a couple minutes later]

What is schedule chicken, you ask? It’s a game in which multiple teams on a project are behind, but they don’t want to report it, and they don’t in the hope that someone else will fess up first, making their own slip moot so they don’t have to. It can have just as disastrous program results as the road version, in terms of delays and cost increases.