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State of Alabama Fighting NASA's New Plan
FleaPlus writes "Alabama politicians have formed a 'task force' dedicated to fighting NASA's new plans to cancel the costly Constellation/Ares program, which is largely based in Alabama. The chronically mismanaged Constellation project attempted to build new rockets in-house and replicate an Apollo-style lunar program with minimal investment in new technologies. NASA's new boosted budget revives formerly suppressed R&D efforts into critical technologies needed for a sustainable push towards Mars and intermediate waypoint destinations, works with (instead of trying to compete with) existing commercial rockets to transport cargo/crew to orbit, and funds a stream of robotic precursor missions to scout other worlds and demonstrate new technologies. The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook."
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving?
A couple of those, big business and health care costs are directly linked to tax law. Big businesses can play the tax game better. Complicated tax law increases the barrier to entry for small businesses. And not paying taxes on employer health care just drives up the cost. Hmmm, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason foreign competition is "unfair" is because they don't have to cough money for Social Security, health care benefits and other things that plump up the cost of labor without adding much of anything. Taxes play a big role in that process.