But we really don’t need a super duper HLV for the Moon or even for Mars, IMO. A simple shuttle derived HLV, either sidemount or inline, that can transport at least 100 tonnes into orbit (with an EDS stage) should suffice.

So instead of a final presidential decision on an HLV in 2015, we could have an HLV ready to go for beyond LEO missions by 2015.

They claim they can get us to the Moon permanently within a decade after the starting gun goes off, with two manned missions per year, all within a $7 billion USD budget envelope. What more do we need?

What’s needed is a clear understanding of what our mission is on the Moon. I have written on this previously:

http://blogs.airspacemag.com/moon/2009/06/25/first-nail-down-the-mission/

Clearly, no one currently in authority at NASA understands the purpose of lunar return and they and others who similarly don’t understand it are the ones informing the decision makers.

Which architecture you choose is irrelevant if you don’t understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Arguably, there has been such a technical review and rebuild of the entire architecture, the EELV based architecture by Frank Zegler and his collegues at ULA. It requires no shuttle derived heavy lift, and relies entirely on existing assets, or on gradual evolutionary modifications of such assets; e.g., the ACES-41 EDS is descended from Centaur; the low boil-off, cryogenic propellant depots and lunar landers are then derived from the ACES-41. There are no “clean sheet” designs, so reliability should be good. The dual thrust axis landers (DTAL) land horizontally after the fashion of the landers depicted in the old TV show “Space 1999″. These are superior to the Altair design in at least 20 different respects; there’s not enough room here to go into it. It can deposit 15 tons onto the lunar surface, and it has a 5 m diameter cargo bay. I don’t know if it could carry the 250 kiloWatt solar arrays you all contemplated in your Going Beyond the Status Quo paper; however the “DTAL-R’s 5 m cargo hold and lunar performance are capable of supporting all of NASA’s planned lunar surface systems, including hard shell and inflatable habitats, crewed rovers, ATHLETE,in-situ resource plants, lunar telescopes, or large drilling rigs.” A reusable SSTO version of the DTAL can deliver 7 tons of propellent to an L2 depot. A tanker version of the DTAL based on the ACES-71 would be able to deliver even more.

They claim they can get us to the Moon permanently within a decade after the starting gun goes off, with two manned missions per year, all within a $7 billion USD budget envelope. What more do we need? I’m surprised this potential architecture isn’t talked about more. I’ve certainly never ran into even one article, blog post, or discussion forum rant that can point out even one showstopper in this design.

I would add that the moon is a natural launch platform, with one-sixth our gravity and yet stable enough for our gradual amassing of paraphernalia, prior to any launch into Space beyond. Bases are inevitable, as is our colonizing of our Moon. Man’s history and innate tendency has been to explore and colonize uninhabited places, and this has always followed a logical progression in terms of effort and distance.

Buzz, with tremendous respect for you and your place in history (and you remain a hero to me and many) I nevertheless would plead that you have ‘been there’, but we, lesser mortals have not – and we’re eager.

While President Obama’s emphasis on better vehicles than those planned for Constellation, is to be applauded, sidelining the Moon and in the meantime the Shuttles (man’s fleet of smoothly-performing, workaday cargo spaceships), could prove a false economy. Falling behind the rest of the world may be irreversible for the US, as Britain experienced with manned Space after Blue Streak et al. If The traditional home of Space Travel, the USA, does relinquishes its hard-earned place at the forefront of manned space exploration (easily lost), by not returning to our moon to finish the job Kennedy started, and establish man’s foothold on our immediate heavenly body, then the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India & China will step in to fill the vacuum (pun half-intended). Matters can be reversed at present – it’s OK to err in the wrong direction, but less so to persist with it.

What is your take on the United Launch Alliance affordable, commercially based, lunar architecture developed by Zegler, Kutter, Barr, et al. Is this architecture “good enough”? Can they get the job done for $7 billion USD per year?

Possibly it is. What is needed is a thorough and objective technical review (Augustine was not that) and re-build of the entire architecture, not cancellation of the program wholesale. First, define the mission objectives of lunar return (to learn the skills we need to live and work off-planet, including especially new enabling activities that have never been done, like resource utilization.) Second, design the architecture you need to implement this mission; if you need Shuttle-derived heavy lift, build it — if you don’t need it, use EELV. This decision should be driven strictly by the objectives to be met and the projected cost envelope (you need to know both — ESAS was clueless about the former).

The issue that I have with the current new direction is that it discards the overarching strategic direction of the VSE. How we implement it is of less (although not zero) concern to me.

As for the “$7 B per year” cost envelope, it has always been my belief that an exploration program can be built that fits into any cost profile. The important thing is to keep the strategic horizon in sight. If we get less money than we expect, we stretch the program out longer. But we make continuous, steady progress towards the goal, which is sustainable and permanent human presence beyond LEO.

(1) The ISS – fully functioning that has a crew & logistics supply line in place….

Sorry, not really. They can probably keep enough supplies coming up for a few years to keep a crew of at least 3 and maybe even 6, via Progress and ATV; HTV is not on the same schedule. There is at present NO return capacity so science experiments, samples, and anything larger than what fits in a astronaut’s pocket won’t be coming back once Shuttle stops. We are already hearing that the lack of return capacity is already restricting the number of interested experimenters from places like the NIH.

(2) the VSE was the product of a year-long study by NASA, the Cabinet Secretaries, and the White House. Both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize it; the agency has been trying to implement it for 6 years.

Yes the VSE was developed by extended planning and review. Constellation was NOT the VSE.

The people testifying before Congress were the Constellation/Exploration people and Dr Griffin. They always said it was on schedule, on budget…It was always on until they would move the schedule further out, or reduce the requirements… Everyone was happy if they were getting truthful answers.

(3) Those of us outside NASA look at the Constellation program in general, and the Ares 1 in particular, and shake our heads in wonder that such colossal failures as these could have come out of NASA. Ares 1 represents a triumph of ego over physics and engineering; the fact that it got as far as it did indicates that something is seriously wrong inside of NASA. Large bureaucracies are supposed to be self-correcting, avoiding serious mistakes such as Ares 1 — NASA didn’t do that, and any president in Obama’s position that let such an agency continue making mistakes without investigating why and correcting them would be shirking their duty.

You are right on this. I was bewildered to see Constellation failing to make the necessary milestones starting almost from the start more than 3 years ago. By 2 years ago it was well known that they could not close the architecture. The defined Orion could not be carried by an Ares 1. I watched from the sidelines. Where was the senior NASA management. They should have gotten on top of this situation and corrected it years ago; they had to let Augustine point out the fallacies ??? Is the senior NASA management worth anything ?

Who are these people ? They should be summarily dismissed or worse. Not only were they wasting our money ($10 billion) and time (4+ years). They’ve now created the near term GAP, and they may very well have killed US HSF for the forseeable future.

(4) I do not think it will be either easy or cheap to re-establish the industrial capabilities that are being destroyed now.

We are discarding an existing spaceflight capability (for all its faults) for the promise…

This is the REAL IMMEDIATE issue. Make no mistake about it, you will need heavy lift capability and a Shuttle derive HLV is your best, and relatively inexpensive hope, for the forseeable future. If you really want to test out the Buzz XM Cruiser, you need to be able to launch ISS-sized or larger modules. If you want in-flight refueling, you’ll need similar sized and heavier mass payloads. A Shuttle derived heavy lift is a relatively inexpensive way to do this. It could be done now with relatively few dollars and in a relatively short amount of time, by people who have already begun to lose their jobs.

Instead, Obama chose a purely political decision to support Colorado with an Orion-lite that there should be no need for.

Does not make any sense at all.

The last one, the Obama-Orion save, is really troubling. There is no rationale for that vehicle, except as a jobs program for Colorado. This shows that Obama cannot be trusted. No telling whether any of his words last week meant anything at all.

@ Paul: There is one industrial capability that is not being discarded, and that’s the EELV family of launch vehicles, thanks to the Air Force. What is your take on the United Launch Alliance affordable, commercially based, lunar architecture developed by Zegler, Kutter, Barr, et al. Is this architecture “good enough”? Can they get the job done for $7 billion USD per year?

I think that your analysis is spot on. One slight departure — I do not think it will be either easy or cheap to re-establish the industrial capabilities that are being destroyed now. So it’s not simply a matter of putting the VSE “on hold” for a time and then picking up where we left off sometime in the future.

We are discarding an existing spaceflight capability (for all its faults) for the promise of a new and better future capability (“The better is the enemy of the good enough”) and exchanging a near destination against which measurable progress is being made for future, distant destinations which are so far off in time and space that we cannot judge whether progress toward them is being made or not.

I suspect that suits some just fine.

Unrefined material has immediate value since it can instantly provide the hundreds and even thousands of tonnes of mass shielding that are going to be required for permanent space stations located at a Lagrange point. Being able to extract oxygen from lunar material and from asteroids is going to be essential if we are to dramatically lower the cost of space travel.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Constellation had little to do with the Moon: it was a Mars program. Cripes, they named their rockets “Ares”. There’s no better proof than that. President Obama did us all a big favor by cancelling that dinosaur. But then he took what could have been a grand opportunity, and blew it. Every poll I’ve seen shows that Americans prefer a Moon program over a Mars program. Yet the vocal minority of Mars advocates managed to get to the President’s ear, and so now we get Constellation redux. Instead of Apollo on Steroids, we get Apollo on Meth: a toothless, skinny version of Constellation.

The sad part is that there was a viable alternative: the affordable, commercially based lunar architecture devised at United Launch Alliance by Frank Zegler, Bernard Kutter and many others. These guys are the top aerospace engineers at the top aerospace company in the world. Their proposal could have got us to the Moon within a decade using today’s technology. It didn’t require HLV’s or fancy robots that don’t exist. It was a lean ‘n’ mean Viking-like architecture that could have got us there in small boats by breaking up the voyage into small parts, just as the Vikings broke up the voyage to North America with stops at Iceland and Greenland.

Moreover, the timing of the ULA proposal was perfect: it came out at about the same time as when Augustine was wrapping up. The ULA proposal could have been the perfect antidote to Constellation. But that would have entailed, in effect, following in the footsteps of President Bush’s VSE. Presumably, President Obama himself is dismayed at how he’s been snookered into following President Bush’s footsteps on issue after issue. So he probably figures that if he can find a relatively harmless issue where he can take a different path, he’s going to take it if he can. Start with medical marijuana dispensaries; now America’s space program.

Unfortunately, it is the Mars advocates like Buzz Aldrin, who have convinced the President that taking the different path in this case is actually the correct path. No other lobby has done more to destroy the US space program. Bypassing the Moon for the sake of Mars gets us neither.

But look on the bright side, Paul. The Obama plan contains seeds of destruction all right: but they are the seeds of its own destruction rather than of the US space program as a whole. Politically, this will be a net loss for the President. On the one hand, he’s managed to alienate the majority of those who care about space at all–Marsnauts are a minority compared to MoonFirst!ers by at least 2 to 1. On the other hand, he’s alienating his base who don’t give a hoot about space. I was watching the speech at the local truck stop, and the waitress said it best right before she changed the channel: “He’s talkin’ ’bout the International Space Station and satellites in space when there’s still people starvin’ on this planet!” (So we watched Dr. Phil instead.) Then there was the USA Today political cartoon the other day, where a guy is complaining about how the national debt “is astronomical”–”but we’re not going to cut the space program!” This goes to show that inspiration from space is the last thing most people want, and it’s certainly not something anybody needs. The next election is going to be close. This may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Then it will be back to square one with a clean slate. The VSE will still be there, and so will at least one sane architecture for bringing the vision to fruition.

It’s time to start recouping some practical economic and strategic and practical scientific returns from our human spaceflight program. Only the Moon offers at least a chance of that happening.

(And let it not be said that there is more more important “pure” planetary science to be done on Mars. Mars is interesting in itself, but it is unique, and thus doesn’t have much to say about the Earth, or the Solar System as a whole. The Moon on the other hand, has a history inextricably tied to Earth, and it preserves a record of what has happened to the Solar System and the Sun for billions of years. From the perspective of “pure” planetary science, the Moon offers more scientific bang for less bucks.)