While Team DIRECT knew how bad solids were for manned spaceflight, they thought they would have to accommodate Thiokol, and to tell the truth, I thought they had that about right.

But Obama has shown more guts than anyone ever imagined.

And more intelligence as well. For the origins of FLEX, see the DPT and NEXT studies.

The only key thing here is that the BFR will be ready for SW3 in 2022.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

Partly true. nicreasing flight rates no the shuttle would lower the cost per flight is dominated by the fixed costs (In the shutles case theres virtually no cost increase with increased flight rates because NASA buries it in fixed costs.), BUT you contradict yourself when you talk about several commercial LVs to fly 20 flights a year. 20 divided by several is likely about 4 a year for each. So they each are in the same trouble as shutle, all stuck giving high prices.

Course this assumes you can get the 20 flights a year. Globally humans only launch 50 flights a year. NASA flight rate will dive after shuttle retires. So unless bigelow or someone develops a big new market, good luck finding buyers for those 20 flights.

True. Basically the Admin and congress don’t really want to do anything with NASA. So sending them to their room with some nice study adn demo contracts to demo things that don’t need to be demoed keeps them busy and out of the politicians hair for a couple election cycles.

OTH, if we get our EELV and SEVERAL commercial LVs to fly humans to space say 20 times each year, then we are looking at NEVER losing our capability to fly humans again.
Nixon cost us this once already.
Now, ex-president Bush did the same to us.
If we wish to avoid this in the future, then we MUST make sure that we have multiple companies that can launch humans. The HLV will come.

But it gets better. If we add in the capability of doing a tug NOW, combined with a fuel depot, then we gain the ability to move the ISS, recover errant sats, recover dead sats and de-orbit them, or simply attach a BA-330 to one to move ppl and cargo around in LEO. That will ultimately lead to an ability to crawl out of the gravity well.

There is a lot going on. It is easy to bog down in the minor things. Don’t allow yourself to do that. Right now, even if we focus on Ares I, we gain another 25MT in 5 years. If we focus on Ares V, we gain 188MT in 10-15 years.
OTH, if we build up our capability in stages, then we can go to the moon at a fraction of the costs, with improved safety.

I don’t think the tax payers really want a manned space program that’s designed purely for space adventurism. I think they want a manned space program designed to pioneer the solar system mainly because most Americans would like to fly in space themselves.

Extremely few people expect to ever fly in space themselves. The vast majority of taxpayers don’t care about space funding, and those that do are divided into a bewildering variety of factions about what they want out of it. Most just want the nationalist feeling that our country is “ahead” of the other countries in some simplistic since, e.g. by going someplace first. Dramatic firsts, no matter how wasteful they seem from we those of us who care more about sustainability, are the Buck Rogers that bring in the bucks. I don’t like this any more than you do, but it’s the political reality.

Another constraint that is probably emerging I call “the eight-year-rule”: an overly expensive long-term project of the last President is probably not going to survive the next one. Thus Bush’s NASA scrapped the Shuttle and tried to scrap the ISS and started Constellation, and Obama’s NASA is canceling Constellation, and if Obama attaches his name to any big projects they will be canceled by the next President. This is a blessing in disguise, since it means that an overpriced, and thus unsustainable, project is more likely to be pruned from NASA than from other government agencies. “Long term planning” by governments is very overrated.

It’s a fascinating challenge to design missions that fit both the dramatic firsts and the eight-year-rule and yet do something to improve sustainable long-term space development as we would like. The extendable ELV plus depot approach and “flexible path” is very good in this regard. Once these are in place it means that the launcher and general infrastructure is ready for a President to pick a goal. All that is required is for NASA and it contractors to design a customized upper stage, habitat, and science packages. So hopefully we can reach a point that if Obama’s successor wants to send some astronauts to orbit around Mars and plant a flag on Phobos, or wants to prove that we can steer asteroids, or have astronauts ostentatiously grab an enemy satellite out of its orbit, or whatever dramatic stunt serves the politics of the time, NASA can focus on the beyond-LEO part of this mission and actually accomplish it in eight years, thereby motivating a President to fund it in the first place. And it’s affordable enough that the DoD can play too if that makes more sense for the politics of the time, but the promise of NASA funding can substantially increase the launch market and thus lower the costs for everybody, as long as NASA does not insist on customizing the launcher.

Now you may complain that dramatic first and the eight-year rules make for a very irrational and wasteful approach to developing space. I couldn’t agree more. But dramatic firsts and the eight-year-rule are how NASA works. They are the rules of space politics. If you don’t like them, don’t ask NASA for money. We live here in the real world, not in a utopia of rational and efficient governments. Despite this, the system of medium-sized rockets that can be modularly expanded into the lower range of HLVs, as with the EELV and Falcon 9, combined with depots and in-space assembly for the larger projects, gives us an underlying rational system that is sustained by commercial and defense orders when NASA politics doesn’t come through.

The Ares I/V architecture was foolish right from the start. The Jupiter HLV or the Shuttle C should have been chosen right from the start.

As long as NASA and its usual suspect contractors were doing the development, it doesn’t really matter which approach was taken. They have X employees that need to be re-employed and they will reemploy that many regardless, unless you do something dramatic like Obama has done and cancel the whole thing en masse. The solid-centric approach of Ares is in many ways simpler than the myriad custom moving parts in liquid first stages, but nothing is simple once those X employees are all assigned to it. Furthermore, all HLV-only architectures suffer from having tooling and infrastructure scale requirements that are far outside those of commercial mainstream launch. Any HLV approach besides ganging commercial medium launcher modules will be expensive, and any HLV approach funded by NASA will be extremely expensive.

I don’t think the tax payers really want a manned space program that’s designed purely for space adventurism. I think they want a manned space program designed to pioneer the solar system mainly because most Americans would like to fly in space themselves.

The Ares I/V architecture was foolish right from the start. The Jupiter HLV or the Shuttle C should have been chosen right from the start.

HLVs are really not designed for efficient manned launches. They’re cargo launchers. And what they would provide for private commercial manned space launch companies are desired destinations in space (space stations & lunar habitats) and fuel depots for commercial flights beyond LEO.

I wonder it that is legend or true and wonder if that could have influenced their decision to pursue a Shuttle-Derived solution.

$2BN is what Ares 1 spent on plotter paper.