…and not safe. Nice catch by Jon Goff that no one else seems to have picked up on:

Basically, unless this source is bogus, or I’m completely misreading things, it’s saying that even NASA admits that their odds of losing a crew or a mission using the Constellation architecture are far worse then they had originally claimed. In fact, at least for ISS missions, we’re talking almost an order of magnitude worse. For ISS, they’re claiming a LOC (probability of losing the crew on any given flight) of 1 in 231, with a LOM (loss of mission) of 1 in 19! If I’m reading this right, that means they expect right now that about 5% of missions to the space station will end up not making it to the station. For lunar missions, the LOC number is 1 in 170, and the LOM number is 1 in 9! That means of every multi-billion dollar mission, they’ve got an almost 11% chance of it being a failure. While some of these numbers have been improving, others have been getting worse.

In other words, it appears that NASA is admitting that the Ares-1 is not going to be any safer than an EELV/EELV derived launcher would’ve been, and in fact may be less reliable.

I’ve never drunk the koolaid that Ares/Orion was going to be more safe than Shuttle (or any previous system). Part of the problem is that (particularly with all of the vibration issues) they’re being forced to put systems in that introduce new failure modes. The other is that in their determination to have a crew escape system (as I’ve mentioned before), they are adding hazards on a nominal mission.

There is only one way to get a safe launch system. We have to build vehicles that we can fly repeatedly, develop operational experience, and wring the bugs out of, just as we’ve done with every other type of transportation to date. When every flight is a first flight that has to fully perform, you’re always going to have a high risk of problems. Unfortunately, NASA decided to do Apollo again instead of solve the space transportation problem.

And along those lines, I should say that I fully agree with Jon:

Quite frankly, I’d almost rather see a gap than try filling it with a kludge like keeping the shuttle flying. The fundamental problem is that even though “commercial” companies like Boeing and LM and Orbital (and hopefully SpaceX if they can get their act together) have been providing the majority of US spacelift for the past two decades, there is no commercial supplier of manned orbital spaceflight in the US. That’s the bigger problem, IMO than the fact that NASA can’t access a space station that it really doesn’t have much use for.

I’d rather see more focus on how NASA and DoD can help encourage and grow a strong and thriving commercial spaceflight (manned and unmanned) sector than how NASA can fix its broken internal spaceflight problems. Once the US actually gets to the point where it has a thriving manned orbital spaceflight sector, there won’t be any gaps again in the future. A strong commercial spaceflight sector with a weak NASA is still a lot better than a strong NASA and a weak commercial spaceflight sector.

Unfortunately, absent a real crisis, the politics seem determined to not encourage that to happen. And the ISS crisis, if it is perceived as one, is likely to cause a panic that still won’t cause it to happen, though it may still result in something better than ESAS (not that we could do much worse).

Mike Griffin has kicked off a study to consider Shuttle extension for five years.

The problem, not mentioned by the article, is that this doesn’t close the gap, unless Ares is abandoned. Shuttle and Ares use the same launch infrastructure, and as long as Shuttle flies, pads and crawler cannot be modified for it. Nor does it allow us to permanently crew the station without Soyuz.

The only real solution (assuming that we want to pay the high costs of continuing Shuttle) is to put a capsule on something else (e.g., Atlas, or Falcon 9 if it ever flies), soon. Maybe Orion, maybe Dragon, maybe something else, but it looks like the Stick is on life support. In fact, as “anonymous.space” says over at Space Politics, it’s already dead. It’s just that Griffin and others have been doing CPR on the body to keep the coroner from getting to it.

What a fiasco.

Wayne Hale explains why we should shut down the Shuttle.

Everything he says is true–much of the infrastructure and support contractors for the system are already gone. That’s why it will be very expensive to resurrect them to the degree necessary to fly past 2010. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but as I wrote in my PJM piece, we have to decide how much ISS is worth to us. And if we want to keep the option open, and as least costly as possible, we need to stop terminating those suppliers and destroying tooling immediately. It’s probably a prudent thing to do, until the next president can make a decision.

It just occurs to me that even if we continue to fly the Shuttle through “the gap” that doesn’t really solve the problem of actually utilizing the station. We are currently planning on relying on dual Soyuzs (what’s the plural of “Soyuz”?) for “lifeboat” capability to allow a six-person crew after completion. If the US is not purchasing Soyuz, we wouldn’t be able to leave Americans on board permanently, unless we wanted to risk losing them in emergency. It seems unlikely that this would actually play out politically, but if there were only one Soyuz there while the Shuttle wasn’t, it would be a Titanic situation, with only enough escape craft for half the crew. Would the Russians just say, “dos vedanya…”? The OSP was supposed to serve in that function, but it was cancelled when the VSE came along.

What a policy Charlie Foxtrot.

I’ll bet that you could find volunteers in the astronaut office, though.

Is ESA getting serious about reusable vehicles? Too bad NASA can’t find a clue.