Jon Goff has been doing yeoman’s work in digging into the ESAS appendices. I’ve done a lot of this kind of architecture trade, and it is indeed extremely sensitive to assumptions. And from just this excerpt, while I haven’t read it myself (I can’t find the time from my day job, and I’m glad that Jon did), it sure looks like the game was rigged (which isn’t at all shocking in the context of all of the problems that have arisen). I was simultaneously saddened and amused by this:

I know that Mike Griffin was claiming that part of the reason for doing Ares-I was to teach NASA how to design launch vehicles again, and I guess we have documented proof of the need.

Seriously though, this is a common rookie mistake. You don’t go basing decisions worth tens of billions of dollars on an unvalidated design tool. Now, this isn’t saying that INTROS is a useless tool, just that it obviously doesn’t capture all the state of the art in stage design, and until it does, its results ought to be taken with the appropriate sized (apparently multi-ton) grain of salt.

Well, apparently NASA does exactly that. Or at least it pretends to base them on it. I don’t think that they’re going to pull the wool over Norm’s eyes, though.

There’s an old saying attributed to Voltaire that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” There are multiple interpretations of this aphorism, but one of them is that one must often accept the achievable, even if flawed, in preference to the perfect but unachievable solution.

Many defenders of Constellation use this argument, saying that if it’s not the best architecture, it’s good enough, and the only one politically feasible at this time, and that any other solution will only cause further delay. Implicit in this argument, of course, are the assumptions that further delay is unacceptable and that it is indeed good enough. Clark Lindsey points out an amusing analogy that Roger Pielke came up with in response to a similar argument by Paul Krugman that current plans for cap and trade are good enough — “Get on the bus.”

I don’t think that Ares is quite as bad as the idea of jumping the Grand Canyon with a Greyhound, but I do think it a vast waste of money, if our goal is space accomplishment rather than keeping parking lots full in Huntsville. From this space enthusiast’s perspective, it is not only imperfect, but it’s not even good enough. Even in the unlikely event that it is successful by NASA’s own cost and schedule criteria, it will be a disaster from the standpoint of making us space faring, flying far too little for far too much money per flight. The goals of the Aldridge Commission were good ones, and as currently planned, it contributes little to nothing to achieving them. As I wrote Sunday, if we need some additional delay to get it right, then we should do that, if it’s at all possible. And if it’s not possible, then we should just give up on having a useful and affordable space program, because this plan is so far from one that I certainly don’t want any more of my tax dollars spent on it.

[Update a few minutes later]

The goals of the Augustine review have been posted on the federal register:

The Committee should aim to identify and characterize a range of options that spans the reasonable possibilities for continuation of U.S. human space flight activities beyond retirement of the Space Shuttle. The identification and characterization of these options should address the following objectives: (a) Expediting a new U.S. capability to support utilization of the International Space Station (ISS); (b) supporting missions to the Moon and other destinations beyond low Earth orbit (LEO); (c) stimulating commercial space flight capability; and (d) fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities.

I can think of many architectures that would do a good job of those four goals, but Constellation isn’t one of them. It really only supports goal (b), and even that not very well. As Clark says, it will be both sad and amusing to watch NASA’s attempts to explain how it does.

You’ll be as shocked as I was to learn that NASA’s evaluation of DIRECT may not have been completely impartial:

“NASA’s October 2007 analysis of DIRECT, on the surface, appears to be a carefully executed analysis of the DIRECT architecture and its central launch vehicle, Jupiter,” notes the rebuttal document.

“However, a closer examination of the document reveals significant flaws in the evaluation of DIRECT that sets up a scenario where DIRECT would inevitably look inferior when compared to Ares.

“The errors are so numerous that the only conclusion possible is that this document was not a true analysis, but rather an attempt to discredit the DIRECT architecture.”

I’ve never been a proponent of that architecture, and haven’t even looked at it in any detail or given it much thought, other than that it’s almost certainly better than NASA’s current plans. But that’s a pretty low bar. I think that if we’re going to be investing billions in new launch systems, we should get some that actually, you know, reduce launch costs, and particularly marginal costs. But I know, that’s just crazy talk.

Taylor Dinerman reviews them in the context of the current NASA:

Law number XXIV would seem a particularly good one: “The only thing more costly that stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man.” The urge of many politicians to spend more on NASA’s Constellation program so as to shrink the “Gap” is well known. The impact of such a decision on the rest of NASA, or on the future space exploration program, is obviously something that Mr. Augustine is going to have to look at very closely.

Another insight: “…we are attempting to develop major new systems with ten year technology, eight year programs, a five year plan, three year people, and one year dollars.” Constellation is trying to escape this dilemma by using existing technology: this may work, but it is dangerous since it assumes that the systems involved are already well understood, something that was so heavily critiqued in the 2003 Columbia Accident Investigation Board report.

As he notes, they still hold up a quarter of a century later. They explain well why a government space program is always doomed to disappoint its boosters.

The title of this post should be the title of Tom Jones’ editorial over at the New York Post, in his defense of NASA’s current architecture and plans:

The shuttle’s successor, Orion, won’t fly until at least 2015. Some critics have called for NASA to scrap Orion’s new booster and go back to the drawing board. More worrisome, President Obama has left NASA leaderless since his inauguration, and proposes over the next four years to cut $3.1 billion from the Constellation program designed to develop Orion and its new Ares I booster. It’s hard to see how either approach will reduce the four-year “gap” between 2011 and 2015, when America will have no human launch capability, forcing our astronauts to ride Russian rockets to the space station.

The last sentence presumes that minimizing the gap should be NASA’s, and the nation’s highest priority in government-funded human spaceflight, to the exclusion of whether or not we get a good solution, or a cost-effective one. Obviously, anyone who has been reading me for long knows that I vehemently disagree.

Augustine said last week that his panel will also evaluate alternatives to the much-debated Ares I rocket booster. But Ares I has been in development for five years, with a first unmanned test flight scheduled for this fall. With adequate funding, I’m sure it can get Orion to orbit.

A review of NASA’s management and program execution is prudent, but also invites further delay in getting Orion flying. Building our first new manned spaceship in thirty-five years will be difficult, but NASA’s people are up to the challenge, just as they are proving with Hubble. If given the resources, I know they will launch Orion, and make it both safer and cheaper to operate than the shuttle. Its Ares boosters will be able to send its crews to the moon and beyond, to nearby asteroids.

The fact that Ares I has been in development for five years, but still hasn’t completed a Preliminary Design Review, should be a hint to Dr. Jones that there may be a problem with the program, or NASA’s management of it, and one that goes beyond a simple lack of funding. And there is little relationship between the supposedly upcoming “umanned test flight” and the actual vehicle design. Many program insiders have claimed that it is a Potemkin test, a public relations exercise to spectacularly demonstrate program “progress,” rather than one designed to give us much insight into actual Ares hardware performance.

There is no doubt in my mind that, given sufficient funding and time, NASA can launch something resembling Orion with something that may resemble Ares I. But it doesn’t follow that allowing them to do so would be a good idea. As I noted in my piece at PJM this past week, even ignoring all of the intrinsic technical issues with the Ares concept, even if it goes as NASA plans, it’s simply not worth the money. All it does is return us to the expensive days of Apollo, and is a huge step backward in capability.

For instance, we just saw the assembly of the ISS, and we are seeing the successful repair and upgrade of the Hubble as I type these words. I assume that Tom is aware that Ares/Orion would have no capability to do either of these things, despite a cost per flight comparable to, and perhaps even higher than that of the Shuttle, after amortizing development costs? (I should note that this is particularly amazing considering that Tom played a major role in that, with three ISS EVAs.)

We have built up a huge experience base of orbital operations over the past two decades, with satellite retrievals and repair, and the assembly of a huge structure in orbit. But NASA’s future plans completely abandon and ignore this capability, returning to the Apollo mentality of putting everything up in a single (or at most two) launches, and not preparing us at all, or at least long putting off the day for things like a Mars mission, for which it would simply be impractical, if not impossible, to stage without orbital assembly.

Once satisfied that our trajectory in space is correct, the President should dedicate the funds to meet those goals. In spending terms, NASA’s annual budget is miniscule: $18.3 billion next year, just one half of one percent of the $3.6 trillion federal outlay. Failing to correct NASA’s chronic budget shortfalls, on the other hand, will cede U.S. leadership in space even as we celebrate Apollo’s landmark achievements.

Yes, it’s a half of a percent, but that’s an artifact of the insane explosion of the federal budget this year, not because NASA is being particularly squeezed. In a normal budget, it would be about what it normally is, a percent or so.

But the problem isn’t the money. As I noted above, there seem to be two implicit assumptions in Tom’s piece — first, that reducing the gap is of paramount importance (though even there, he ignores the possibility of Falcon 9/Dragon), and that we should be willing to spend whatever it takes to not only make that happen, but to get back to the moon the way NASA proposes to do so.

Like the Constellation architecture itself, this was the mentality of Apollo. The program’s driving phrase was “waste anything but time.”

But it made sense then, because while space exploration was no more important then that it is now (i.e., not very), beating the Soviets to the moon was, as a key propaganda element of the Cold War, and it was justified to spend vast amounts of money to achieve that goal, despite the fact that it was so economically inefficient that we chose to no longer spend the money on that architecture once the goal was achieved.

We have to consider the possibility, which I hope Augustine will, that in fact the Ares concept is a poor use of taxpayer dollars if we want to have a cost-effective and mission-effective system. Tom’s editorial assumes a priori that there is no better way to go. But if there is, it’s certainly worth a year or three of additional gap. After all, we lived with a gap in the seventies while the Shuttle was under development, and the world didn’t come to an end. And if the private sector is sufficiently motivated, it is likely that it can solve the gap problem much faster than a fully funded Ares, particularly given that the confidence that it can hit the delayed 2015 date is so low.

I like Tom, but this is just NASA boosterism, and I don’t agree that it would be good policy, for either the taxpayers, or for those of us who want to see the US develop serious space capability.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Phil Plait has more boosterism at the Post. Again, it’s the typical plea for more money for NASA, on the assumption that money is all that is lacking, with no serious (or in this case, even unserious) thoughts as to how the money should be spent. And when he says that we need a “modern Apollo program,” it’s an indication to me that he doesn’t really understand what the Apollo program was all about.

What we need is a modern space policy, more attuned to the traditional national values of individualism and free enterprise than NASA has ever been.

Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration made the disastrous policy decision to eliminate intra-government competition in launch systems, and assigned expendables to the military and reusables to NASA. As a result, fifteen years later, we had the X-33 fiasco, and since then, have no significant government activities in the latter area.

But the Air Force has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for data on reusable first stages (and interestingly, it includes suborbital as a mission category, in which case it could be a single-stage reusable). There’s no serious money flowing yet, or requests for actual proposals, but I hope that this means that the DoD will finally pick up the ball that NASA dropped, and get on with the business of supporting the vital development of space transports.

[Via Doug Messier]