Waiting for the Ares I/Orion/Constellation Obituary
Since Keith put up his post last week announcing the imminent (and long anticipated) death of Ares I, I’ve been waiting for the obituaries to appear.
So far nothing official, although his subsequent Kremlin-watching post suggests the Congressional supporters of the Stick are getting out the paddles and adrenaline for heroic measures.
Reports suggest that the new NASA budget could cancel elements of Constellation and replace the ISS crew ferry missions with commercial vehicles, accelerated to flight by government funding. Which is excellent news, overall, though it could make things very interesting on the job front in the near future should Orion be one of those elements.
While I’d much rather see commercial space services develop organically, to the extent that the new policy resembles the “Air Mail” scenario promoted by many commercial space advocates it’s at least a sizeable improvement over the NASA-centric program of record.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:47 am
I dunno, while I think canceling Ares-I and the current Program of Record is a great idea, I just can’t see congress actually doing it. My guess of what will come out of all of this is a zombified program of record with a few minor tweaks and Titanic-deck-chair rearrangements to punt the problem a few more years down the road. Hopefully there will be some bones thrown at commercial space and advanced R&D, but my hope for Congress directing NASA to do something sensible are pretty low.
~Jon
January 28th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
These “commercial space services” are going to appear only with a generous dollop of federal money — the 6 billion in additional spending NASA is supposed to receive over the next five years will basically pay for R&D costs of at most one COTS-D launcher. And assuming one flight per month for crew or cargo to the space station, there’s opportunity for at most 100 commercial flights between now and the end of 2020 (less if European and Japanese and Russian resupply vehicles are employed).
This doesn’t look like an air mail scenario to me. It looks like contractor support — like having Raytheon technicians and Pratt and Whitney engineers working alongside military flight crews at overseas AF bases. Maybe it’ll progress to the point where commercial space takes a larger role in operations, like Blackwater in Iraq. But that’s a long way away from regularly scheduled Pan Am flights to the moon.