Ares 1 Won't Make it to the Moon

Ares I,
Used to be the Crew Exploration Vehicle
Now it's just a cheap shuttle replacement

I seriously wonder how many times manned spaceflight enthusiasts are going to put up with being told about some huge vision and then having the paper-crunchers sell them out. It's enough to turn the most serious liberal into a libertarian.

What's even more amazing to me is that I saw this coming all along. There's simply no way that a president of one party is going to announce a twenty-year space vision. It's just not politically feasible. Whoever the next president is, they will have their own vision. The other party will be generous in criticisms. The committee chairmen in congress will look after programs in their districts and could care less about the greater national goal. The dynamics say it just won't work.

Fifteen guys wearing Star Trek uniforms with signs saying "Bring back the moon!" protesting space funding won't make it to page 11 in the Washington Post.

There are people who will say, hey, we'll just move up to the Ares II when we go to the moon. We'll just switch right on over to that other model.

That's a load of horse manure. You can't spend billions test flying one platform and then switch to another, simply because it has the same brand name. Did we ever try out the heavy-launch version of the shuttle? Ever wonder why? Because risk-adverse managers weren't about to just bolt-on a couple more SRBs and see what happened.

"We'll just go back to the table later on and re-figure what we'll need for the lunar missions"

Total bull. It's like the fairy tales told to children. you have to be very naive, have no knowledge of history, and want the mission badly to buy into it.

Back in the beginning, everybody knew we were playing a serious game. People were going to get killed. Aviation was the same way. In aviation, however, people flew hardware more and more, working out the kinks. After a thousand flights in all sorts of configurations with all kinds of deaths, we got a little better. Then we flew some more. Now flying in an airplane is safer than driving to the airport.

In spaceflight, each disaster was an excuse for years of working groups tweaking papers and presenting them to congress. We flew the hardware less and less, and flying it became more and more risky. We didn't have a free-for-all. In fact, we tried very hard NOT to have Joe Blow building his own rocket. That's only changed very recently, when it was painfully obvious how inept NASA was at flying anything bigger than a weather balloon.

Now, it seems, NASA can't even execute a program that is basically a re-hash of a thirty-year-old system. If there were an award for totally screwed performance ability, NASA has got to be at the top of the list. Since that seems too much, what else could we dumb down for them to do? Perhaps they could be responsible for the Fourth Of July fireworks display on the National Mall. Although one supposes that the fireworks would occur sometime after Thanksgiving, and involve four bags of pop rocks and a sparkler. (With a budget of four billion)

NASA is full of good, smart people. They do not deserve to be in an agency so dysfunctional. WE do not deserve to be paying for them to be an agency so dysfunctional. Somebody here needs some relief.

When I invented my Markham Assessment Tool, I did so because of two things: 1) people inside a project always knew when the project was off the rails a long time before anybody else did, and 2) if we could have an anonymous, non-confrontational way of communicating what was wrong early, we could save money and make organizations run better. I still believe that. This latest information from NASA just seems to confirm that the agency needs either to be eliminated or radically changed in order to get anything useful done.