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]

Paul Spudis has some guidance for the Augustine Commission to update the 1990 report to the 2009 report, based on what we know about the moon now that we didn’t then:

what do these discoveries mean for lunar return? We now know that sustained human presence on the Moon is possible, largely because we’ve found a source of near-constant power (permanent sunlight) and a source of sustenance and rocket propellant (volatiles, including water). The robotic Clementine and Lunar Prospector missions showed us that the poles, almost completely unknown in 1990, are inviting oases on the lunar desert. There, we can extract hydrogen and oxygen to make air and water for life support and propellant to fuel rockets. The sunlit areas can generate near continuous electrical power, with regenerative fuel cells providing power for the short duration eclipse periods. Locally obtained power and consumables means that continuous human presence is possible, without the enormous expense or unproven technology of large nuclear reactors and the delivery of massive quantities of material from Earth.

The new Augustine committee should be made cognizant of these facts. The more we learn about the true nature of the Moon, the more the goal of learning to live there on a quasi-self sufficient basis appears feasible. This opens up wholly new areas of operations and commerce in space, undreamed of as little as twenty years ago. It has the potential to change the entire paradigm of spaceflight, from a narrow, government-run, science-oriented program, completely dependent upon the caprice Congressional largess to a self-sustaining, free-market program, in which NASA develops and demonstrates new technologies that open up spacefaring by many different passengers and payloads for a wide variety of purposes.

Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh space policy air?

Dr. Griffin is telling people that there is no need to check his work. Of course not.

In comments, “Red” sums up the problems with Griffin’s approach:

Dr. Griffin doesn’t seem to be aware of what the goals of the Vision for Space Exploration are. The goal is not for NASA to build a rocket, or two rockets. The goal is not to send astronauts to the Moon, or to Mars, or to near-Earth asteroids. Here’s the goal, according to the Vision for Space Exploration:

“Goal and Objectives
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program. In support of this goal, the United States will:
• Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;
• Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
• Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
• Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests”

Note that the space exploration program is just a means to an end. The purpose is to “advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests”. Also notice the strong emphasis on innovative technologies, knowledge, infrastructure, and international and commercial participation. Also note that some “decisions about the destinations for human exploration” are left to the future.

To emphasize commercial participation, the document later states:

“Acquire crew transportation to and from the International Space Station, as required, after the Space Shuttle is retired from service.” (Note that “Acquire” doesn’t mean “Design, Build, and Operate”).

“Pursue commercial opportunities for providing transportation and other services supporting the International Space Station and exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.”

The Ares-based plan has nothing to do with any of this. Unlike EELVs or new commercial launchers, Ares rockets don’t support U.S. economic interests. The’re government rockets, so they can’t capture commercial launch business, or launch commercial satellites. They also aren’t useful for U.S. national security launches or payloads. They also aren’t useful for science payloads beyond astronaut missions (Ares V class science missions are too expensive).

The Ares rocket plan doesn’t involve international participation. It takes money away from the robotic exploration program mentioned above and described in detail in the VSE. The Ares rockets are too expensive to develop and operate, and hence fail the VSE “sustained and affordable” criteria above. Ares rockets are too expensive to allow space infrastructure like the VSE mentions. Even if Ares I and V were kept, they could incorporate in-space fueling to bring in commercial participation and spur the U.S. launch market (and as a side benefit dramatically increase payload to the Moon), but they don’t. The Ares plan under Griffin didn’t fund COTS-D commercial crew transport needed by the VSE (see above) – the recent stimulus package partial funding related to commercial crew transport came after Griffin. The Ares program is intended to break as little ground as possible technologically to reduce development risk, so the innovation mentioned in the VSE is gone. Innovation in other areas is drastically reduced to fund Ares (you don’t see very many robotic ISRU demos on the Moon, for example, or reusable space transport components in ESAS, in spite of that approach being central to the kinds of economic, security, and science benefits described here by Dr. Paul Spudis and Dennis Wingo).

Hey, but other than that, it’s a great plan.

[Early afternoon update]

In looking at this analysis, while I knew that ESAS was missing much of the Aldridge recommendations and the VSE itself, I hadn’t realized how almost completely orthogonal it is to them until I saw it all in one place like this. Was the Bush administration unaware of how far off Griffin had taken the plan, or were they indifferent? I know that if I had been the president, I’d have asked for an evaluation by the Aldridge team immediately upon announcement of ESAS/Constellation, scoring it against their own criteria (and we paid very close attention to those criteria when performing the CE&R studies), because it was a radical departure from previous anticipated plans. And I’d have likely forced a course correction on it. It would be worth an interview with Marburger to find out just what was going on.

My suspicion is that they just didn’t pay much attention to it, once the policy was in place, and they had an administrator who was supposed to know what he was doing. It just wasn’t a policy priority in the context of the other problems. Which isn’t surprising, of course, because as I’ve long pointed out, space isn’t important, and hasn’t been for over forty years.

I’ve often noted that, had the Bush administration been truly serious about the VSE, they would have at least attempted to create a new agency to carry it out, because NASA simply carries too much bureaucratic and pork-laden baggage from its Cold-War origins. This would be similar to what happened in the eighties, when the Reagan/Bush administration realized that they couldn’t count on the Air Force to do missile defense properly, and set up SDIO to report directly to the SecDEF.

Anyway, Frank Sietzen asks the question today, if you were building a new space agency from scratch, what would it look like?

The latest word is that the new administrator is going to be Charles Bolden. I remain disturbed by the Abbey connection. It will be interesting to see what Augustine comes up with, and how it’s received.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the NBC story.