Orion, already overweight, just got heavier:

“Preliminary estimates show that if this 30-40% [turbulence] heating augmentation heating is applied to the aerothermodynamic database the heat shield mass may increase up to 20%,” says an internal NASA report obtained by Flightglobal.

I wonder if, instead of using an ablator, a tile system would be lighter? It would be more maintenance intensive (particularly with water landings), but it wouldn’t be as bad as the Shuttle, because many of the tiles would be symmetrical and more mass producible. We were never really allowed to do this trade in Phase B at Northrop Grumman–NASA just told us they were going to supply the TPS.

I’m actually quite surprised at this–I would have thought that they’d have modeling an ablative shield down to a science by now. Apollo was way overdesigned, because they didn’t have any experience or good analytical tools to indicate how much shielding they needed. If you look at the heat shield on an Apollo capsule, you can see that it is just slightly charred, with most of it unburned; it could have done a couple more missions without refurbishment or replacement. But based on that experience, we should have been able to predict the optimal weight of an ablator designed to come back from the moon pretty well, and years ago. How did this come up just before PDR?

Anyway, now they have unexpected weight growth in the program at the same time that they have weight and performance problems with the Ares 1. And apparently there are budget problems at LM, as well, if this report is true:

The ORION contractor is overrunning. The minions are out of money. Where can 20-30% more funds be dredged up to cover this miscarriage? You guessed it…the little man.

The minions have let the contractor off the hook for meeting its small business obligations this year. The same obligations that were bid as part of the winning proposal, ostensibly offering a better package than the opposing team, are now null and void. As a result, some of those little companies will start disappearing, lacking jobs and income.

They seem to be achieving the trifecta–failing on performance, schedule and budget. It’s a program manager’s nightmare.

[Update a few minutes later]

Some further thoughts over at Gravity Loss:

What will the payload landed on the moon be? What propellants are used? What is the Altair’s or Orion’s mass? And work back from there to TLI mass and ultimately to launch from Earth, all with generous margins. And it has seemed that a certain cycle has formed. First a solution on Ares I is based on some logic linking it to Shuttle hardware, infrastructure or Ares V with common elements, which should save a lot of money and time and keep the workforce etc etc. Somewhat later, rumors about a severe performance shortfall on either launcher start circulating. Then after a while NASA announces a new configuration where the commonality is disrupted. And again forward we go.

Unfortunately, the concepts seemed to be driven more by politics than engineering. That was often the case in Apollo, too. The Manned Spaceflight Center could have remained at Langley, but there were political reasons to move it to Texas. Marshall didn’t have to be in Huntsville–they could have moved the rocket team at Redstone to somewhere else (e.g., the Cape, whose location really was driven by geography and not politics). But there were two differences in Apollo. It had essentially unlimited budget, and its success was politically important. Neither applies to the VSE, yet NASA, by Mike Griffin’s own admission when he announced the architecture, not only chose to do Apollo over again, but to do it “on steroids.”

Over at Res Communis.

Ferris Valyn has some candidates. Most of them seem implausible to me. The only ones that I can imagine are at all realistic are Patti Grace Smith, Lori Garver and Pete Worden (the latter would certainly shake things up, which is one reason that he almost certainly won’t get the job). Certainly Hansen has nothing in his resume that would qualify him–he’s a scientist.

Of course, much depends on who the next president is. One likely name not on the list, assuming that McCain wins: Craig Steidle.

There’s a piece over at the WaPo today by Marc Kaufman that lays out pretty well the problems that we face in civil space policy, though I think that the international competition aspects are overstated. The pace of all these other activities remains almost as glacial as our own, and until someone develops a transportation breakthrough (and by that I mean a high-flight-rate reusable system, not warp drive or space elevators) none of it presents a serious threat to us. But it points out that the policy apparatus, as I always says, doesn’t view space as very important. The beginning of the article, and first two pages, are all about budget constraints, and I was wondering if he would ever get around to mentioning ITAR. Toward the end of the piece, finally, he did. In terms of our losing our dominance in commercial space, this is the number one reasons. It’s really been a disaster, and a bi-partisan one.

It’s a little out of date, since it mentions that Mike Griffin claims that additional funding could accelerate Constellation by two years, to 2013, because Griffin’s own program manager now says that it probably wouldn’t.

I disagree with Mike Griffin’s comment here:

“We spent many tens of billions of dollars during the Apollo era to purchase a commanding lead in space over all nations on Earth,” said NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, who said his agency’s budget is down by 20 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1992.

“We’ve been living off the fruit of that purchase for 40 years and have not . . . chosen to invest at a level that would preserve that commanding lead.”

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on human spaceflight over the past four decades, more than enough to have developed a robust transportation and in-space infrastructure that would have kept us well in the lead. The problem was not how much was spent, but in how it was spent. Jobs were more important than progress. That sadly remains the case today.