The cost of the payloads already exceed the launch cost, by rather a lot. That's why people are willing to pay $10,000 to get a pound of stuff into orbit. The real trick is getting the cost of a pound to orbit down, and down substantially. That way Space Pirates can afford to get there, too.
"as they get closer to completion NASA will pick the best one to fully fund for actual production"
Maybe... that's definitely how NASA previously ran these things, when there were design competitions, and when NASA funded the vehicle development (and influenced the final designs), and then cancelled the program before it could be completed (which they did several times). However, it's not totally clear that this is what NASA has in mind, for CCDev. There are indications that NASA wants a private market, with more than one vendor, and plans to buy flights on systems from at least two vendors. However, there are other indications that NASA is just doing the same old thing with new program names, and a similarly anemic budget which will, ultimately, lead to project failure.
"Instead of continuing to develop the Ares 1 and Orion, the administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial space taxi to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit."
It looks like all of those competing for this are "perch it on top of a rocket" systems, and the "Dream Chaser" team have already switched rockets at least once in their design history. It's likely that if Falcon lives up to its potential for improved reliability, it could enter this market later, as the lifter for one of the other systems.
It seems the path isn't clear because the outcome hasn't been determined, yet. NASA seems to be funding the CCDev (Commercial Crew Development) program at a level far too modest to result in construction of actual hardware suitable for a test flight, at this point. They are dangling the the same carrot they did last year with COTS, that NASA will buy crewed flights from commercial industry. Nobody took it seriously when the requirement was issued in full Valley-Girl Voice: "fly our astronauts to the ISS a few times, like, starting next year when we retire the Shuttle, then we dump you and replace you with Orion, OK?"
The main difference from last year is that NASA is no longer planning to compete against those efforts, with it's own craft. That's a huge improvement from the perspective of a company considering this market, but it may not be sufficient, when it's clear that:
NASA doesn't want to be dependent on a single vendor, and would like two systems, from two vendors (a smart move, which will reduce the chances of long outages in the event of a design problem, as happened with the Shuttle, twice, but which cuts in half the number of flights you can expect to sell to NASA),
NASA doesn't seem to have a budget sufficient to fund full development of those systems,
NASA will only be buying a few flights per year to the ISS, for some time to come,
the budget for purchasing those flights has already been announced ($6 billion over 5 years), and
that budget is far lower than NASA's own estimate for building a single man-rated system (Orion + Ares I).
You can't just go to the marketplace and say, "I want to buy rides in nuclear powered DeLoreon, and I'm willing to pay standard cab fare rates in the D.C. Metro Area, oh, and by the way, half of them should be rides in nuclear powered Porche, which I'll buy from your competition, instead of from you, oh, and I only want three rides per year," and expect that to actually happen.
However, everybody involved might be banking on the notion that NASA has now backed themselves into a corner. They won't have an option other than to buy from the commercial market, once Ares I and Orion are shut down. NASA will be forced to pay "market rates" for these launch services.
If NASA doesn't fund the launcher development, and only buys 1 or 2 flights per year from each vendor, the per-flight market rate is going to be about a billion bucks. Don't like the price? We'll give you a discount, if you buy 30 flights per year so we can achieve economies of scale.
The other potential up-side is that private launch firms probably have some market opportunity to sell to other countries which would like to have improved access to the ISS, or other crewed access to space, but which have a reluctance to fund their own system development. Japan (HOPE-X, and ESA (Hermes) are obvious candidates, having previously tried to build a crewed spacecraft, but potentially other nations such as India, which might elect to direct their R&D budgets toward in-space activities, rather than reproducing the ability to get there).
It also appears that NASA may be transferring the technology from Orion to a private company. This idea was apparently floated under the name Orion Lite, with the idea being a quicker access to the ISS by reducing the capsule's life support requirements to a few days (down from a few weeks).
Killing Constellation might actually be the best thing for increasing the chances that a kid gets to fly in space. Constellation was going to lock us into a flight architecture that was not suitable for anything other than occasional grandstanding flights to the Moon or Mars. It was not suitable for the basis of a space economy or a scalable transportation system that could support a lunar mining base and orbital facilities to build solar power satellites, for example. NASA clearly doesn't have a direction to get people into space, but now that it's out of the way, maybe other efforts can get a toe hold. (NASA hasn't yet arrived at a formula for stimulating this, the COTS model was fundamentally flawed, but I suspect that perhaps as few as five more years of floundering, and buying rides from Russia, along with watching China and India get into space, will focus America on this problem.) Here are a few potential contenders:
Right now, there are too many disposable rockets, chasing too small a launch market. Most of the private efforts are not able to get sufficient funding for the sort of technology advancement which will be required to get the cost per pound in orbit down by much, which in turn is required if anything useful is gonna happen up there. A seldom-recanted but critical part of the X-33 story was that the business model for VentureStar fell apart. There were at least one, if not two satellite phone companies planning to orbit hundreds of telecom sats. They were looking for large buys, on the order of a flight per week, for years on end, of Shuttle-class payloads (50,000 lbs), and wanted lower cost per pound. When those companies looked like they were going to fail, the primary contractor concluded that the remaining launch market (NASA plus industry at roughly the level we see today) wasn't big enough to justify private funding for the VentureStar, even after they X-33 notorious technical issues were studied and believed to be resolvable.
Here's the basic problem: NASA can't afford to build a rocket that can safely take 3 to 5 people to LEO several times a year, because they were not appropriately funded for the task when it was assigned. The extended COTS fantasy, wherein NASA decided, arbitrarily, some date and price for "trips to the ISS!" that private industry would gleefully make happen, in return for NASA agreeing to purchase about one or two flights, from each of 2 or 3 vendors, for a period of four or five years, until Ares I was ready. Never mind that private industry was building Ares I. COTS wasn't even a plan to fail, that was Ares I. COTS was a backup plan to fail.
One thing changed. Now, private industry can reasonably expect NASA to purchase two or three flights per year, for about eight years, given the ISS extension. That means private industry can spread their R&D cost out over maybe a dozen flights, instead of maybe 4 flights. I guess that's a start.
However, it does't fix the biggest problem. NASA isn't buying enough flights to convince a single vendor to build a competent system, let alone more than one vendor. Would you want to fly in either of the cost-cutting tin cans that are going to result from this amateur space race? Assuming anything actually flies before the "vendors" either pull the plug or go bankrupt.
The new not-quite-as-heavy lift approach is problematic. First of all, it's naive to assume that an 100-150mT HLV derived from Shuttle technologies is going to be much quicker to develop (or better by any other metric) than the Ares V plan, which was also based on Shuttle technologies, but which had already been through a process of design which helped produce a reasonable vehicle, within reach, almost certainly to be more reliable, and appropriate to Mars class missions. Furthermore, the constraint that isn't being considered (even under the Constellation program) is the flight rate that can be sustained by the Shuttle-dervied infrastructure (pads, crawlers, vertical assembly building, etc.) Doing anything interesting in space requires getting more stuff into space more often. If it takes a half dozen frightfully expensive launches to assemble a Mars flight, how often do you think we'll go there?
The Mars Mission is only "on" in the sense that it has always been "on" since Reagan. It's not "on". It' never been "on". Canceling the first R&D program in thirty years that actually had the goal of building a heavy lift launcher suitable for Mars scale trips, and replacing it with a nebulous plan to purchase launch services from a private launch market which doesn't have an incentive to put the kind of R&D required to develop a Mars trip scale launch system is not "on" in any sense other than "on crack".
The history of the effort to develop a successor to the Shuttle is littered with cancelled projects, and test programs that were never part of a coherent technology development program. You appear to be referring to the DC-X, but in fact, the other finalist candidate for the X-33 test demonstrator program was not the DC-X, it was a winged-flyback rocket design from Rockwell, which hadn't been flown, either.
"You'd think that a company with an $8 billion R&D budget could build a web browser that is 100% standards compliant, performs well, and adds enough value for their users to make it the browser of choice on Windows."
Sure, they could, but the easiest way to do it would be to base it on WebKit. That would be too humiliating.
A set of recent experiences has me wondering if perhaps The Fine Summary and Article have a point. Within the past few days, I've "overheard" (in discussion forums online) several people express something along these lines:
"I don't see why we're having this telethon and sending all this money to Haiti. Did other countries help the U.S. after 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina?!! No!!!" -- Random People (Not Me, Not You)
Mostly, the folk expressing this sentiment don't know each other, and only a couple know me (e.g. friends, friends of friends, strangers to each other).
This isn't merely based on blatant falsehood, it's a very peculiar notion, one that stands out from the daily din. I've seen it raised, independently, three or four times this week. Where did this notion come from? Why do they uniformly cite both of those examples, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina? Coincidence, or did they get this from the same source? Perhaps it's merely because these are the two largest disasters to strike the U.S. in the past ten years, but why cite both, and not merely one, or the other, particularly when one is a man-made "disaster", not really parallel to the hurricane and the earthquake. I wonder if maybe they are parroting the same original source. Did someone like Sarah Palin tweet or MyBookFaceSpace it, as with the "death panels" thing?
Uniformly, these folk have chosen to ignore simple evidence that the claims, that other countries didn't offer assistance to the U.S. after 9/11 nor after Katrina, are false. (In fact, many nations assisted the U.S. following both incidents, offering even the lives of their sons and daughters in the case of those allies fighting in Afghanistan, and serious assistance of various kinds during the International Response to Hurricane Katrina).
This is just one example, but it's a curious one, based not only on ignorance of a few specific facts, which ought to be common knowledge, but apparently on a militant desire to remain ignorant. (Offering the link above leads them to resort immediately to changing the subject, occasionally to what they consider to be my own personal failings, particularly in people I've never met. The sudden and fairly extreme hostility offered up by both acquaintances and strangers when simple evidence is presented reminded me of the term "splitting.)
I wonder if the insulating bubble effect of modern segmented news and opinion delivery is building a society which is incapable of or at least resistant to the synthesis of new ideas, which itself is a rational response to the cognitive dissonance which results from inconvenient facts.
I still think facts matter, but if they only matter to a handful of people, can democracy survive?
I haven't had time to thoroughly research the claim (that Obama pledged to kill Constellation), but as far as I can tell, it's false.
I don't personally recall Obama pledging to kill Constellation in his campaign, and I do pay attention to such things. He did promise to extend the Shuttle flight schedule by one flight, which has apparently been done. (The AMS instrument, which was built at great expense was going to be grounded by NASA in their rush to kill the ISS and retire the Shuttle, but that instrument shows up on the flight schedule, now.)
During the campaign, there were one or two articles claiming that he promised to increase the NASA budget during a speech in Florida, but those pledges don't appear to have been repeated anywhere, don't appear to have been followed up on by any career journalists, and it's not clear the reporting was accurate. Really, there was hardly any discussion of NASA in the campaign at all, by any candidate.
You've accidentally illustrated the difference between hardware and software. If you had, instead, said something similar about a hypothetical effort to clone the PC XT, expressing your admiration for the architectural design of the ISA bus, longing perhaps for the "real true, and familiar, full length slot" of the XT chassis, and the thousands of add-in cards like 9600 Baud modems and Parallel Printer Adaptors that you could still pick up at ReCompute, people would immediately mod you into oblivion, and I wouldn't even have to see your idiotic post. But if you say anything, no matter how crazy, about software, it makes you a hero in the eyes of somebody with mod points.
People installing Warp 4 wished they had install CDs, too. When it first shipped, Warp 4 arrived in a box containing an enormous stack of Warp 4 install floppies (3 1/2", roughly 1.44 MB form factor).
"The primary method to access a partition in windows is certainly via a drive letter, but if you do manage to go past 26 partitions, you'll get "A-A:," A-B:," and so on... The thing is that many of the gripes more technical folks have had about Windows over the last decade have been solved in one way or another..."
You keep using that word, "solved." I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Bush signed off on the initial Constellation Plan. Bush made space exploration a pro-Republican issue. I don't know McCain's specific position, but the Republican Party line would have been in favor of the $3 Billion plan that the Augustine Commission recommended would be necessary to push human exploration of space ahead at the levels Bush was targeting."
The only part of what you said that bears resemblance to reality was "I don't know". Bush provided to NASA what's known as an un-funded mandate, which led NASA to decide to shut down the ISS immediately after its construction was completed. McCain and Obama, like Bush, don't have much understanding of, nor interest in, spaceflight, as far as can be told from examining their public statements and actions.
Exactly. But that's the plan. They are pretending like this is a good idea. It pretty much sucks all the way around. It locks the US into an architecture where per-flight costs for people in orbit are much higher than Ares I. It reduces per-flight lift capacity substantially, which will lead to much larger numbers of flights required to do anything interesting, such a a flight to Mars. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except for the high per-flight cost. This plan is a desperate attempt to solve a short term budget problem, by locking us into long term budget constraints. It's worse than doing nothing (e.g. worse than canceling manned spaceflight) because we won't be able to fix the architecture for another 25 years. It's really, really bad news for manned spaceflight.
Go look at the materials from the Augustine Commission. It makes not sense, and it wasn't a presented option to the Obama administration, to build Ares V if the Ares I is getting cancelled (they both use the same 5-segment SRB). What's gonna get built might be *called* the Ares V, to keep the taxpayers confused, but it will be much smaller, with much less lift capability.
So, uh, did you stop taking your meds, or go and leave yourself logged in or something? Idolizing John Wilkes Booth (who assassinated the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and then apparently blogged about it) is typically a sign of libertarianism at least, or anarchism possibly. Asserting Booth was a patriot doesn't jibe with you wanting the big, bad, out of control states-rights-trampling, wasteful fraudulent and abusive Federal government to save your pathetic hind quarters from a big bad voluntarily formed privately owned profit seeking Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum worshipping corporation, now, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of the payloads already exceed the launch cost, by rather a lot. That's why people are willing to pay $10,000 to get a pound of stuff into orbit. The real trick is getting the cost of a pound to orbit down, and down substantially. That way Space Pirates can afford to get there, too.
Maybe... that's definitely how NASA previously ran these things, when there were design competitions, and when NASA funded the vehicle development (and influenced the final designs), and then cancelled the program before it could be completed (which they did several times). However, it's not totally clear that this is what NASA has in mind, for CCDev. There are indications that NASA wants a private market, with more than one vendor, and plans to buy flights on systems from at least two vendors. However, there are other indications that NASA is just doing the same old thing with new program names, and a similarly anemic budget which will, ultimately, lead to project failure.
The Washington Post reporting on this seems to agree with you.
Obama budget proposal scraps NASA's back-to-the-moon program
It looks like all of those competing for this are "perch it on top of a rocket" systems, and the "Dream Chaser" team have already switched rockets at least once in their design history. It's likely that if Falcon lives up to its potential for improved reliability, it could enter this market later, as the lifter for one of the other systems.
The main difference from last year is that NASA is no longer planning to compete against those efforts, with it's own craft. That's a huge improvement from the perspective of a company considering this market, but it may not be sufficient, when it's clear that:
You can't just go to the marketplace and say, "I want to buy rides in nuclear powered DeLoreon, and I'm willing to pay standard cab fare rates in the D.C. Metro Area, oh, and by the way, half of them should be rides in nuclear powered Porche, which I'll buy from your competition, instead of from you, oh, and I only want three rides per year," and expect that to actually happen.
However, everybody involved might be banking on the notion that NASA has now backed themselves into a corner. They won't have an option other than to buy from the commercial market, once Ares I and Orion are shut down. NASA will be forced to pay "market rates" for these launch services. If NASA doesn't fund the launcher development, and only buys 1 or 2 flights per year from each vendor, the per-flight market rate is going to be about a billion bucks. Don't like the price? We'll give you a discount, if you buy 30 flights per year so we can achieve economies of scale.
The other potential up-side is that private launch firms probably have some market opportunity to sell to other countries which would like to have improved access to the ISS, or other crewed access to space, but which have a reluctance to fund their own system development. Japan (HOPE-X, and ESA (Hermes) are obvious candidates, having previously tried to build a crewed spacecraft, but potentially other nations such as India, which might elect to direct their R&D budgets toward in-space activities, rather than reproducing the ability to get there).
It also appears that NASA may be transferring the technology from Orion to a private company. This idea was apparently floated under the name Orion Lite, with the idea being a quicker access to the ISS by reducing the capsule's life support requirements to a few days (down from a few weeks).
Please, Slashdot Gods, give me a preference filter to hide all comments which begin with "Meh".
Killing Constellation might actually be the best thing for increasing the chances that a kid gets to fly in space. Constellation was going to lock us into a flight architecture that was not suitable for anything other than occasional grandstanding flights to the Moon or Mars. It was not suitable for the basis of a space economy or a scalable transportation system that could support a lunar mining base and orbital facilities to build solar power satellites, for example. NASA clearly doesn't have a direction to get people into space, but now that it's out of the way, maybe other efforts can get a toe hold. (NASA hasn't yet arrived at a formula for stimulating this, the COTS model was fundamentally flawed, but I suspect that perhaps as few as five more years of floundering, and buying rides from Russia, along with watching China and India get into space, will focus America on this problem.) Here are a few potential contenders:
Skylon
Mystery Lockheed Martin Test Program
Vulcan (DARPA)
SpaceX Falcon
Right now, there are too many disposable rockets, chasing too small a launch market. Most of the private efforts are not able to get sufficient funding for the sort of technology advancement which will be required to get the cost per pound in orbit down by much, which in turn is required if anything useful is gonna happen up there. A seldom-recanted but critical part of the X-33 story was that the business model for VentureStar fell apart. There were at least one, if not two satellite phone companies planning to orbit hundreds of telecom sats. They were looking for large buys, on the order of a flight per week, for years on end, of Shuttle-class payloads (50,000 lbs), and wanted lower cost per pound. When those companies looked like they were going to fail, the primary contractor concluded that the remaining launch market (NASA plus industry at roughly the level we see today) wasn't big enough to justify private funding for the VentureStar, even after they X-33 notorious technical issues were studied and believed to be resolvable.
Here's the basic problem: NASA can't afford to build a rocket that can safely take 3 to 5 people to LEO several times a year, because they were not appropriately funded for the task when it was assigned. The extended COTS fantasy, wherein NASA decided, arbitrarily, some date and price for "trips to the ISS!" that private industry would gleefully make happen, in return for NASA agreeing to purchase about one or two flights, from each of 2 or 3 vendors, for a period of four or five years, until Ares I was ready. Never mind that private industry was building Ares I . COTS wasn't even a plan to fail, that was Ares I. COTS was a backup plan to fail.
One thing changed. Now, private industry can reasonably expect NASA to purchase two or three flights per year, for about eight years, given the ISS extension. That means private industry can spread their R&D cost out over maybe a dozen flights, instead of maybe 4 flights. I guess that's a start.
However, it does't fix the biggest problem. NASA isn't buying enough flights to convince a single vendor to build a competent system, let alone more than one vendor. Would you want to fly in either of the cost-cutting tin cans that are going to result from this amateur space race? Assuming anything actually flies before the "vendors" either pull the plug or go bankrupt.
The new not-quite-as-heavy lift approach is problematic. First of all, it's naive to assume that an 100-150mT HLV derived from Shuttle technologies is going to be much quicker to develop (or better by any other metric) than the Ares V plan, which was also based on Shuttle technologies, but which had already been through a process of design which helped produce a reasonable vehicle, within reach, almost certainly to be more reliable, and appropriate to Mars class missions. Furthermore, the constraint that isn't being considered (even under the Constellation program) is the flight rate that can be sustained by the Shuttle-dervied infrastructure (pads, crawlers, vertical assembly building, etc.) Doing anything interesting in space requires getting more stuff into space more often. If it takes a half dozen frightfully expensive launches to assemble a Mars flight, how often do you think we'll go there?
The Mars Mission is only "on" in the sense that it has always been "on" since Reagan. It's not "on". It' never been "on". Canceling the first R&D program in thirty years that actually had the goal of building a heavy lift launcher suitable for Mars scale trips, and replacing it with a nebulous plan to purchase launch services from a private launch market which doesn't have an incentive to put the kind of R&D required to develop a Mars trip scale launch system is not "on" in any sense other than "on crack".
The history of the effort to develop a successor to the Shuttle is littered with cancelled projects, and test programs that were never part of a coherent technology development program. You appear to be referring to the DC-X, but in fact, the other finalist candidate for the X-33 test demonstrator program was not the DC-X, it was a winged-flyback rocket design from Rockwell, which hadn't been flown, either.
Sure, they could, but the easiest way to do it would be to base it on WebKit. That would be too humiliating.
Mostly, the folk expressing this sentiment don't know each other, and only a couple know me (e.g. friends, friends of friends, strangers to each other).
This isn't merely based on blatant falsehood, it's a very peculiar notion, one that stands out from the daily din. I've seen it raised, independently, three or four times this week. Where did this notion come from? Why do they uniformly cite both of those examples, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina? Coincidence, or did they get this from the same source? Perhaps it's merely because these are the two largest disasters to strike the U.S. in the past ten years, but why cite both, and not merely one, or the other, particularly when one is a man-made "disaster", not really parallel to the hurricane and the earthquake. I wonder if maybe they are parroting the same original source. Did someone like Sarah Palin tweet or MyBookFaceSpace it, as with the "death panels" thing?
Uniformly, these folk have chosen to ignore simple evidence that the claims, that other countries didn't offer assistance to the U.S. after 9/11 nor after Katrina, are false. (In fact, many nations assisted the U.S. following both incidents, offering even the lives of their sons and daughters in the case of those allies fighting in Afghanistan, and serious assistance of various kinds during the International Response to Hurricane Katrina).
This is just one example, but it's a curious one, based not only on ignorance of a few specific facts, which ought to be common knowledge, but apparently on a militant desire to remain ignorant. (Offering the link above leads them to resort immediately to changing the subject, occasionally to what they consider to be my own personal failings, particularly in people I've never met. The sudden and fairly extreme hostility offered up by both acquaintances and strangers when simple evidence is presented reminded me of the term "splitting.)
I wonder if the insulating bubble effect of modern segmented news and opinion delivery is building a society which is incapable of or at least resistant to the synthesis of new ideas, which itself is a rational response to the cognitive dissonance which results from inconvenient facts.
I still think facts matter, but if they only matter to a handful of people, can democracy survive?
Agreed. Killing Constellation might prove to be better for manned spaceflight in the long run. Hit the reset button.
An excellent overview of related pledges and current status:
Obama campaign pledges related to space
I haven't had time to thoroughly research the claim (that Obama pledged to kill Constellation), but as far as I can tell, it's false.
I don't personally recall Obama pledging to kill Constellation in his campaign, and I do pay attention to such things. He did promise to extend the Shuttle flight schedule by one flight, which has apparently been done. (The AMS instrument, which was built at great expense was going to be grounded by NASA in their rush to kill the ISS and retire the Shuttle, but that instrument shows up on the flight schedule, now.)
During the campaign, there were one or two articles claiming that he promised to increase the NASA budget during a speech in Florida, but those pledges don't appear to have been repeated anywhere, don't appear to have been followed up on by any career journalists, and it's not clear the reporting was accurate. Really, there was hardly any discussion of NASA in the campaign at all, by any candidate.
Well, NASA's anual budget is actually closer to the monthly cost of the Iraq war, but your point remains essentially valid.
You've accidentally illustrated the difference between hardware and software. If you had, instead, said something similar about a hypothetical effort to clone the PC XT, expressing your admiration for the architectural design of the ISA bus, longing perhaps for the "real true, and familiar, full length slot" of the XT chassis, and the thousands of add-in cards like 9600 Baud modems and Parallel Printer Adaptors that you could still pick up at ReCompute, people would immediately mod you into oblivion, and I wouldn't even have to see your idiotic post. But if you say anything, no matter how crazy, about software, it makes you a hero in the eyes of somebody with mod points.
People installing Warp 4 wished they had install CDs, too. When it first shipped, Warp 4 arrived in a box containing an enormous stack of Warp 4 install floppies (3 1/2", roughly 1.44 MB form factor).
You keep using that word, "solved." I do not think it means what you think it means.
When the sun finally shining in Jerusalem tomb of your Lengji, we will meet your resurrection.
The only part of what you said that bears resemblance to reality was "I don't know". Bush provided to NASA what's known as an un-funded mandate, which led NASA to decide to shut down the ISS immediately after its construction was completed. McCain and Obama, like Bush, don't have much understanding of, nor interest in, spaceflight, as far as can be told from examining their public statements and actions.
You are fact-impaired. Start your education, here: US National Debt Graph
Exactly. But that's the plan. They are pretending like this is a good idea. It pretty much sucks all the way around. It locks the US into an architecture where per-flight costs for people in orbit are much higher than Ares I. It reduces per-flight lift capacity substantially, which will lead to much larger numbers of flights required to do anything interesting, such a a flight to Mars. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem, except for the high per-flight cost. This plan is a desperate attempt to solve a short term budget problem, by locking us into long term budget constraints. It's worse than doing nothing (e.g. worse than canceling manned spaceflight) because we won't be able to fix the architecture for another 25 years. It's really, really bad news for manned spaceflight.
Go look at the materials from the Augustine Commission. It makes not sense, and it wasn't a presented option to the Obama administration, to build Ares V if the Ares I is getting cancelled (they both use the same 5-segment SRB). What's gonna get built might be *called* the Ares V, to keep the taxpayers confused, but it will be much smaller, with much less lift capability.
Oh, more trolls won't be like me 'cause I wasn't trolling. I was spanking.
So, uh, did you stop taking your meds, or go and leave yourself logged in or something? Idolizing John Wilkes Booth (who assassinated the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and then apparently blogged about it) is typically a sign of libertarianism at least, or anarchism possibly. Asserting Booth was a patriot doesn't jibe with you wanting the big, bad, out of control states-rights-trampling, wasteful fraudulent and abusive Federal government to save your pathetic hind quarters from a big bad voluntarily formed privately owned profit seeking Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum worshipping corporation, now, does it?