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NASA Pitches Heavy Lift Vehicle To Congress
BJ_Covert_Action writes "Well, Congress demanded, last year, that NASA develop a budget plan and proposal for a new heavy lift vehicle in light of the Ares V cancellation. Recently, NASA gave Congress just what they wanted. On January 11th, Douglas Cooke pitched an interim report to Congressional members detailing the basic design concepts that would go into a new heavy lift vehicle. Congress required that the new heavy lift vehicle maximize the reuse of space shuttle components as part of its budget battle with President Obama last year. As a result, NASA basically copy-pasted the Ares V design into a new report and pitched it to Congress on the 11th. The proposed vehicle will require the five segment SRB's that were proposed for the Ares V rocket. It will utilize the SSME's for it's main liquid stage. It will reuse the shuttle external tank as the primary core for the liquid booster (the same tank design that is currently giving the Discovery shuttle launch so many problems). And it will utilize the new J-2X engine that NASA has been developing for the Ares V project as an upper stage. In other words, NASA proposed to Congress exactly what Congress asked for."
Really, it was expected that they would use the Ares V. The Augustine report had good things to say about it, their problem was with the Ares I. Killing Constellation was really about ditching that as no longer required so they could get serious about the V and the actual deep space equipment (whether it is for the moon, an asteroid, whatever). The problem that I see is that the mandate that they reuse as many shuttle components as possible means that they made some significant changes to the Ares V before giving it back to congress, namely reusing the SSMEs instead of RS-68. The SSMEs are amazingly efficient, but also amazingly expensive, so they don't fit on an expendable segment. Fortunately, they seem to have left themselves an opening to renegotiate that later, FTFProposal:
“This design would allow NASA to use existing Shuttle main engine and booster component assets in the near term, with the opportunity for upgrades and/or competition downstream for eventual upgrades in designs needed for production of engines after flying out the current inventory of main engines and booster components"
As always, though, this project is set up to fail.
“However, to be clear, neither Reference Vehicle Design currently fits the projected budget profiles nor schedule goals outlined in the Authorization Act,”