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."

Comments

Let's get this straight

[MrEricSir]

* Congress demands new Moon program
* Nasa dusts off old plans, calls it Ares V
* Congress cancels Ares program
* Congress asks for new heavy lift vehicle
* Nasa hands them the plans for Ares 5

Man, talk about recycling...

Re:Let's get this straight

[Nyeerrmm]

Because Ares V is not the best design, but the best design that fulfills the requirements of using the existing workforce, SRBs, SSMEs, etc.

This is basically ESMD's way of passing the buck back to congress and saying they can do one of two things:
1. Build an HLV that keeps jobs in all the nice districts... OR
2. Do it on time and on budget.

In other words, congress' requirements are impossible to fulfill, and ESMD is saying it as politely as possible.

Re:Let's get this straight

[Opportunist]

Politicians telling Scientists how to do science, what could possibly go wrong.

You would have thought they'd learn from Vietnam when they told the military how to wage a war...

Re:Let's get this straight

[plover]

No, what Congress should be saying is "we need a vehicle that can place an 11,000 kg load in a 25,000 km orbit, it has to fly by 2015, we need 5 flights per year for the next ten years, ten of those flights will be manned missions to the ISS, and you have a budget of $6.5 billion." They can optionally say "and only build it in the USA", because the US economy is also in their jurisdiction.

Let NASA worry about reuse, booster tech, the number of stages, or if it's named Ares.

Politician Engineer

[Mechagodzilla]

Letting Congress pick rocket components is equivalent to me (colorblind) pick out the paint scheme for my house. Both will end in amazing disasters...

Reuse shuttle parts?

[h4rr4r]

Sounds more like corporate welfare then science to me.

Let's just ask Elon what a Falcon XX will cost instead.

What, this is nonsense

[mrwiggly]

Well, first off all the problem with discoveries tank is due to a manufacturing problem with the stringers, not a design flaw.

Second of all, why use SSME's? They are designed for re-use, and have restart capability that will not be needed. A better choice would be the rocketdyn's RS-68, single use, cheap as fuck, provides more lifting power.

Why does Congress make engineering decisions?

[MobyDisk]

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

So congress made engineering decisions for NASA. They told NASA to reuse some parts from something else. And does Congress even know if that actually saves money? There have been plenty of times I've been told to develop something and to reuse an existing piece of code, and I've had to disappoint someone by pointing out that reusing their old COBOL EXE does not actually shrink the timeline. :-( In mechanical engineering, I've learned that reusing parts often adds a lot of work.

Maybe that isn't the case here, but Congress should instead have set constraints and let NASA decide how best to implement it. No doubt the new request also tells them what vendors to use, and what state to by them from, and where to eat lunch so that the money gets spread around to their own pet projects.

be PROACTIVE!

[Thud457]

Unlike Congress, a fence post has the wisdom to refrain from doing anything actively stupid.