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Astronaut Group Endorses Commercial Spaceflight
FleaPlus writes "Buzz Aldrin and twelve other astronauts have published a joint endorsement of commercial human spaceflight, stating that 'while it's completely appropriate for NASA to continue developing systems and the new technologies necessary to take crews farther out into our solar system, [the astronauts] believe that the commercial sector is fully capable of safely handling the critical task of low-Earth-orbit human transportation.' They are confident that commercial systems (which NASA already relies on for launching multibillion-dollar science payloads) can provide a level of safety equal to the Russian Soyuz and higher than the Space Shuttle, while strengthening US economic competitiveness. They also support the expected endorsement of the White House's Augustine Commission regarding NASA's use of commercial spaceflight — the Commission's final report will be released today." And here's the Augustine report itself (PDF).
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Add in the fact that ARES-I is designed to lift the Orion into an orbit with a NEGATIVE PERIGEE, unless the Orion itself circularizes its orbit. Also, they've been trimming Orion left, right, and center in order to get it light enough so "the Stick" can lift it. This means cutting crew, cutting land based landing, cutting crew comforts (eg toilets) and cutting safety gear.
It's particularly ironic when you consider that in NASA's ESAS study which selected the internal Ares I design over commercial launch vehicles, the safety standards were tweaked so that the Ares I design was the only one which could satisfy the absurdly high standards. Of course, it now looks like Ares can't actually satisfy those standards, and the mass trim-backs may well result in a system considerably more dangerous than the commercial alternatives.
The ARES I has serious safety issues.
None that wouldn't have turned up in any other new rocket design.
Actually, the nastiest safety issues with the Ares I are a direct result of the design decision by former administrator Mike Griffin to use a single gigantic solid rocket motor as the first stage. It turns out there's a really good reason (or rather, many good reasons) that nobody's used such a design for a manned rocket before. I'm sure given enough time and money ($35 billion is the latest cost estimate) the excellent engineers at NASA can create workarounds for the inherent design problems, but I'd imagine their time and effort could be much better spent.