Henry Spencer (whose wisdom is finally becoming available on the web, apparently) explains:

An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept, that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft. There were several ways to handle the situation, but in my opinion the best was to just forget about Ares I entirely: build Ares V, or something like it, right away and use it for all the launches.

With a big launcher, there would be plenty of margin for weight overruns in development. Using the big launcher for Earth-orbit missions would obviously permit much heavier payloads there. Moreover, the lunar missions would get greater margins too, because they’d be done with two big launches rather than a big one and a little one, so they could weigh almost twice as much.

There is also an important pragmatic issue: the biggest threat to NASA’s return to the Moon is the possibility that Congress will delay or cancel development funding for Ares V. Doing Ares V right away, and using it for the Earth-orbit missions as well as the ones to the Moon, would have ensured that this crucial element of NASA’s plans actually gets built.

Of course, better yet would have been a focus on in-space infrastructure, drawing on ISS assembly experience, to allow us to use existing launchers. That would have also freed up money for earlier development of injection stages and landers, and made lunar missions much more of a fait accompli by now.

This (to me) amazing report on the status of the thrust-oscillation problem just has me shaking my head. If accurate, they don’t even understand enough about it yet to know which weight-increasing kludge may mitigate it, and by how much. And the vaunted Ares 1-X “test” next year won’t provide them with the information they need:

I see no discussion of the new failure modes that could be introduced by the addition of these systems, or their effects on first-stage reliability (which was supposedly the big feature of this approach). For example, if the active system has a failure (and I suspect that a failure of just one of the engines would be a failure, due to asymmetries), the vehicle will get shaken apart. It seems to be single point (unless they can still reach the oscillation-reduction goal with single engine out).

And now they’re going to put shock absorbers into the couches to further isolate the crew, which implies that the Orion itself is going to sustain a lot more rockin’ and rollin’ than the current requirement stipulates. Which in turn implies a heavier vehicle to handle the accelerations and stress.

No one will consider the possibility, apparently, that this is an unclosable design, though such things happen in real life, once one gets outside of Powerpoint world.

With the July status of the engineering efforts showing the issue to be an across the board high “RED” risk to Ares I’s development, the mitigation process is likely to continue until at least the end of the decade.

So months more, and billions more, without knowing whether or not the road they’re on is a dead end.

[Update a few minutes later]

More depressing news (again, assuming accuracy) here.

[Another update]

The Chinese seem to be having problems, too:

China’s English language state owned television channel CCTV9 has revealed the fact that on its past two manned missons the astronauts have experienced physical discomfort from the vibration of the rocket on its ascent

The tv news segment goes on to report that the rocket’s chief designer says that changes to the “frequencies” of the engines and the “electrical circuits” have been made to try to eliminate this vibration problem.

Whatever that means. I wonder if it’s POGO? And just how much “physical discomfort” was there? Not enough to end the missions, or the crews, apparently.