If I thought that Gene Kranz knew what he was talking about, I’d be pretty dismayed about this comment:

“This is the best game plan that I have seen since the days of President Kennedy,” Kranz said of ESAS, comparing it to the DC-3 and the B-52. “The system that Griffin’s team is putting into place will be delivering for America 50 years later…

What an insane comparison. The DC-3 and B-52 have been operating for decades because they were mission effective and affordable (the latter because they were extensively reused, and not thrown away after, or during each flight).

If a century after the founding of NASA we are still sending people into space in little capsules on large expendable rockets, that will be a testimony to a tremendous failure of national will, and of private enterprise. If that’s the best that we can do, I predict that we’ll just give up on human spaceflight, and we should. So either way, this prediction is very unlikely.

Fortunately, he’s just suffering from sixties nostalgia, and there’s little basis for his belief.

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently that was from his oral testimony, or an answer to a question. Here’s the written testimony as submitted, which doesn’t make the DC-3 comparison, or talk about fifty years in the future.

NASA Watch has the other witnesses’ testimony as well.

[Update about 11 AM EDT]

One other point about the Kranz testimony from the Space Politics link:

Kranz stepped in and described the cost in money and schedule he experienced man-rating the Atlas and Titan for the Mercury and Gemini programs.

Comparing human rating an Atlas V to the original Atlas and Titan isn’t a useful comparison. The latter were converted ballistic missiles, whereas Atlas V was designed from scratch to be a reliable launch system. All that’s really required to human rate it is to add Failure On-Set Detection (FOSD), and ensure that its trajectory doesn’t create any blackout zones for aborts (which it has plenty of power and performance to do).

Jim Oberg has the most extensive public report yet on last months Soyuz mishap, over at IEEE Spectrum.

It’s a fascinating read, but it has to give us pause in relying on Soyuz when the Shuttle is retired.

…or rather, for outer space. Dennis Wingo presents a backup plan for when ESAS collapses. It’s much better than Plan 9. And it’s even better than ESAS*.

I was a big Shuttle-C fan twenty years ago. Or rather, I was a Shuttle-derived fan. Shuttle-C has the problem that Dennis admits–a lack of payload volume and (more importantly, from the standpoint of building really nice space stations) a lack of payload diameter, since it’s constrained by current pad infrastructure, including the RSS (Rotating Service Structure), to fifteen feet. I preferred in-line concepts (such as Shuttle-Z) that put payload on top of the ET, which would allow twenty-two-foot-diameter, or larger, with a hammerhead configuration. Ah, good times, good times. At least in our dreams.

I’ve long thought that the time was past for such things. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem, which is the high cost of launch, and corresponding low levels of activity, something that neither ESAS, Direct, or Plan 9B address. But if we insist on such a trivial goal of sending a few astronauts to the moon a couple times a year a decade or more from now, then this plan makes more sense than what NASA’s doing. We’d probably only waste half as much money.

I’m not sure why we even need Orion, though, in this scenario. If it’s a LEO-only vehicle, why waste money to build something that competes with the private sector? I thought that the idea was to get NASA out of LEO, and force them to focus on the “beyond.”

* Admittedly, a low bar in both cases–it remains uncertain whether
or not ESAS is better than Plan 9. Actually, now that I think about it, there are similarities. ESAS is, after all, an attempt to conquer space by resurrecting Apollo from the dead.

[Update in the afternoon]

I “snear“? I didn’t know I knew how to do that…whatever it is. In fact, I’d never even heard of the word before today. Who knew that Mark was so hip (even if he doesn’t know how to read my posts)?

Rob Coppinger has dug up an interesting Chinese video. As he points out, we didn’t do training in a water tank in the sixties, but the Chinese are standing on the shoulders of giants. But their program will continue to move at a snail’s pace, and never be a serious threat, as long as they continue to emulate NASA and Russia.