I've seen enough bull being slung about Obama's proposed plans for NASA - I need to say a few things here. From the first time I saw the Orion/Ares plans, I thought they were a very poor choice. Nothing in it (barring the use of new materials & avionics in Orion) advanced the art of getting humans into space. It was a repurposing of existing hardware & designs that could keep current contractors employed, and couldn't be criticized for endangering astronauts. But the Ares 1 design wasn't safer - there are good reasons why no one uses solid rockets as the main stage for man-rated launch system. Chiefly, they just aren't safe. The Air Force studied the Ares 1 and chose not to adopt it for their own manned launch programs, because they found that the escape system couldn't get the capsule clear of the explosion should it fail. Ares 1/Orion is a big fat payload stuck on the end of a very long stick of controlled explosive, but none of the people promoting Constellation wanted to talk about that.
Second - go look at the post Elon Musk put up yesterday. Yes, his company is one of those private sector space developers Barack Obama mentioned. But he quotes the Augustine Commission, chiefly to the point that Constellation was never going to work. Even if you discounted all the development costs, launches would be more expensive than the shuttle, and carry smaller payloads. Constellation simply made no sense, either economically or in terms of advancing the state of the art of American space vehicles. I for one am glad to see it gone.
There's no guarantee that the Obama plan will be successful, but it certainly won't run off into a swamp & sink, which was exactly where Constellation was going to wind up, taking NASA with it. Ever since Congress got its claws into the shuttle program, NASA has been at the mercy of bureaucrats & bean-counters who don't give a rat's ass about engineering or the benefits of exploring & exploiting space. In my opinion, many space advocates have been exhibiting signs of Stockholm syndrome, willing to do or say almost anything to appease Washington to keep NASA and manned space flight alive. The Bush plan was just the latest episode - there was no way the Bush administration or a Republican-dominated Congress was going to fund the proposed programs at a useful level. It was just a sop to keep the aerospace industry and influential space advocates content and supportive of the administration. I understand why those people are throwing bricks at the Obama plan now, but I prefer painful but clear-minded planning to comfortable lies that will never produce real progress.
I know there are a lot of people out there who won't agree with this, but I felt it was finally time to oppose the stream of bull that's coming from the main stream media. It's time the folks reporting on this subject actually went and did some actual research, instead of just regurgitating the PR packets they're getting.
