Jeph says:

It’s very simple when the facts are looked at.

Ares is;
a program which costs 14 times as much to develop as either EELV did, yet offers no performance improvements.

a program which then costs that all over again in order to finally create the Lunar launch capability.

a program which will leave the US with a 5-year gap in spaceflight capability and a 6-year gap in the capability to rotate crews on the ISS.

a program which promised to close the gap to 2011 and has actually lost more than 4 years of ground for the 3 years of work already put in.

a program which requires ISS to be killed in 2016 in order to fund it.

a program which *requires* Congress to give NASA a minimum 23% year-on-year budget increase just to meet its minimum baseline requirements (34% if ISS is to be retained beyond 2016).

a program which promises to lay-off 65% of all Kennedy Space Center contractor staff — 5,200 jobs lost of the 8,000 KSC had at the start of FY2008.

a program which promises to lay-off 41% of all Johnson Space Center contractor staff — 2,400 jobs lost of the 5,900 JSC had at the start of FY2008.

a program which promises to lay-off 42% of all Michoud Assembly Facility contractor staff — 800 jobs lost in the already-hurting New Orleans area of the 1,900 MAF had at the start of FY2008.

a program which promises to lay-off 67% of all Stennis Space Center contractor staff — 200 jobs lost of the 300 SSC had at the start of FY2008.

a program which has been effectively silencing the Astronaut Corps concerns.

a program which has documentation on extremely serious structural and induced environment problems yet passes its PDR amazingly easily — First time.

a program which created a never-seen-before “Yellow-Red” category to dump all 11 of the serious “Red” problems into at the last moment, because they had to find some way to circumvent their own “can’t pass PDR if there are any Red issues” rules.

a program which performs a PDR but doesn’t allow anyone to RID certain critical documentation. *at all*.

a program where the list of internal complaints about the PDR is almost as long as the PDR documentation itself.

a program which changes the human safety requirements just because its own solution is found to be impossible to meet the rightly-demanding rules which were laid out at the start of the program.

a program which hypocritically used those same demanding human safety rules to justify why the competition (Atlas and Delta) were unsuitable, yet won’t reconsider them once those rules have been changed and would no longer discount those competitors.

a program which has less performance margin available for its crew launch vehicle than any other launcher requires for unmanned cargo’s. Surely a human vehicle should have greater margins, not less?

a program where its own engineers feel the need to join an ‘underground movement’ in order to get their voices heard because management reacts so viciously to any and all dissent.

a program where management fires or transfers anyone who expresses a disagreement with them even behind closed doors.

a program where its own senior engineers resign over their serious concerns with the program.

a program which costs so much that it stifles all other technology development, and leaves no air in the room to develop Propellant Transfer technologies, Nuclear Propulsion Technologies or Mars-forward technologies — and where there will be no budget for any such development to even begin all through at least 2020.

a program which has so-far stripped the Science Mission Directorate of half its funding in order to support this overly-expensive pet-project of the Administrators (almost former).

a program which has done the same to the the Aeronautics division too.

a program which won’t let anyone else “under the hood” — it screams of a cover-up.

a program which completely destroys the US’s only existing Heavy Lift system in order to replace it with a whole new one — replicating the same fundamental mistake of discontinuing Apollo and starting again.

I won’t support a program which supports compromising the Crew Spacecraft design in order to squeeze it on a specific launch vehicle — has Shuttle really taught us nothing about compromising safety on crew spacecraft?

I won’t support a program which has been unable to stand against public criticism on its own merits and has instead chosen to fabricated lies and disinformation against *all* its rivals in order to try to persuade people away from them — I specifically mean disinformation about Atlas & Delta first, with DIRECT only appearing much later on the scene.

I won’t support a program, that with all those problems, still refuses to consider plausible alternatives which have been presented and which is determined to ‘stay the course’ towards an unaffordable and unsustainable solution no matter the consequences, very much in the manner of the (in)famous Captain Ahab.

Additional mass was added to Ares to dampen the vibrations from the T.O. from shaking the crew [Orion module] to death. Ares has a major problem with pogoing (lurching) along the length, as well as flexing across the diameter due to its length.

5-segment boosters are unproven hardware. the components and sub-assemblies are proven, but not the hardware those components are contained by.

Ares I has a major concern for drift until tower clear. Wind beyond 15 knots can cause it to drift into the tower.

Ares V, if it is built, is too heavy for the crawler/transporter. the C/T can handle total 15 or 16 million pounds, and the Ares V with C/T weighs about 18 million lbs.

red says:

- a program whose expense has prevented the funding of COTS-D or similar crew transportation and rescue commercial services for the International Space Station and other purposes (in spite of the following Vision for Space Exploration directives: “Acquire crew transportation to and from the International Space Station, as required, after the Space Shuttle is retired from service” and (with the exception of the lightly funded COTS cargo program) “Pursue commercial opportunities for providing transportation and other services supporting the International Space Station and exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit” [Note that the meaning of “Acquire” is clear in the VSE document, as it’s later used as such: “NASA could decide to develop or acquire a heavy lift vehicle”

- a program whose expense has prevented the development and deployment of an adequate series of lunar robotic precursors for science, engineering, lunar resource utilization demonstration, and other purposes needed to prepare for astronauts (in spite of the following Vision for Space Exploration directive: “NASA will begin its lunar testbed program with a series of robotic missions. The first, an orbiter to confirm and map lunar resources in detail, will launch in 2008. A robotic landing will follow in 2009 to begin demonstrating capabilities for sustainable exploration of the solar system. Additional missions, potentially up to one a year, are planned to demonstrate new capabilities such as robotic networks, reusable planetary landing and launch systems, pre-positioned propellants, and resource extraction.”

- a program which is using funding needed for near-term national-level needs in satellite-based Earth observations and science

- a program whose expense has caused the cancellation of the New Millenium technology demonstration series, the lack of new funding for Centennial Challenge innovation prizes, the NIAC advanced concepts program, and others

- a program whose expense has prevented adequately taking advantage of the ISS capabilities now that they’re nearly complete

- a program with expected costs per lunar mission of $4-$5B, according to several estimates

- a program which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would cause additional huge cuts, beyond those it has already inflicted, to NASA Science and Aeronautics programs to keep on schedule

- a program which fails to address the central goals of the Vision for Space Exploration, and in fact actually harms those goals (including Vision for Space Exploration goals using robotics for Mars, Outer Planets, and Extra-Solar Planets) at least until lunar missions are well under way (with any later help for those goals quite speculative): “The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program.”

- a program which fails operate in the context that the Vision for Space Exploration specifically and repeatedly stresses: “international and commercial participation”

- a program which leaves most of NASA’s efforts vulnerable to a single failure, whether technical, managerial, political, financial, or other

- a program whose expense leaves NASA unable to participate in a meaningful way in some of the most promising trends in the space industry, such as the prospect of improved use of smallsats and commercial introduction of reusable suborbital rockets

- a program whose expense has already led acting NASA Administrator Scolese to consider scaling back lunar efforts to sorties – a plan that is too close to the original Apollo program to be worth the considerable time, effort, and opportunity cost (in spite of the Vision for Space Exploration’s directive to “Use lunar exploration activities to further science, and to develop and test new approaches, technologies, and systems, including use of lunar and other space resources, to support sustained human space exploration to Mars and other destinations.”)

- a program that discards the considerable, hard-won capabilities in satellite servicing and on-orbit construction that NASA has achieved with, for example, Hubble and the ISS

- a program that, in spite of considerable expense, does not create or leave behind inherently useful space infrastructure, such as commercially, scientifically, or militarily useful launch capabilities, propellant depots, space tugs, point-to-point reusable space vehicles, or reusable lunar landers

- a program whose Ares 1 rocket violates the following specific Vision for Space Exploration directive: “NASA does not plan to develop new launch vehicle capabilities except where critical NASA needs—such as heavy lift—are not met by commercial or military systems. Depending on future human mission designs, NASA could decide to develop or acquire a heavy lift vehicle later this decade.”

- a program that violates the following Vision for Space Exploration directive: “In the days of the Apollo program, human exploration systems employed expendable, single-use vehicles requiring large ground crews and careful monitoring. For future, sustainable exploration programs, NASA requires cost-effective vehicles that may be reused, have systems that could be applied to more than one destination, and are highly reliable and need only small ground crews. NASA plans to invest in a number of new approaches to exploration, such as robotic networks, modular systems, pre-positioned propellants, advanced power and propulsion, and in-space assembly, that could enable these kinds of vehicles. … Other breakthrough technologies, such as nuclear power and propulsion, optical communications, and potential use of space resources, will be demonstrated as part of robotic exploration missions. The challenges of designing these systems will accelerate the development of fundamental technologies that are critical not only to NASA, but also to the Nation’s economic and national security.”

Rick Boozer says:

Thomas,

I must admit the ideas in your document might be great to implement. The rest of us have been trying to get the information you see posted here to people who have the power to do something with it. If you can’t get your ideas to those important people, you are just as much of an “epic fail” as the rest of us. But again, the points in your document would have merit if the right people took them seriously, just like most of the ideas posted on this blog page are.