Obama was against Constellation before he was for it....

[MKSheppard]

Two years and nine months later....



Link

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA and Alliant Techsystems (ATK) of Salt Lake City have agreed to collaborate on the development of the company's Liberty Launch System as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Development Round 2 activities.

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BTW, it now has a French designed upper stage in place of the Ares I Upper stage...
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Link



And where will the Space Shuttle Main Engines come from for the Obama [tm] version of Constellation?

Link

NASA’s three retired Space Shuttle orbiters are set to donate their entire Main Propulsion Systems (MPS) to the opening salvo of Space Launch System (SLS) Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles (HLV).

I'm sure the museums who paid $50~ million for each Orbiter are loving the fact that they will get defaced artifacts with no SSMEs, but in fact replica SSMEs in the back.

By the way, what's different about SLS, other than it being Ares V on a slight diet and a spiffy Apollo-Era paint scheme?

Why will this rocket with many of the same elements as Ares V, be affordable when Ares V wasn't according to Obama?

How will they affordably recreate the workforce, which was already laid off by this point? (A lot of shuttle related workers were laid off in late August).

This will get some study contracts to get through the 2012 election, and then quietly die if Obama is re-elected.

[MKSheppard]

BTW, this is effectively the circa 2005 Ares V with the Shuttle derived core (diameter same as External Tank); with SSMEs.

When NASA realized how stupid throwing away multiple pairs of $50 million dollar engines designed for reuse between 50 flights was; they switched to RS-68, which was developed out of a 1980s/1990s effort to develop a simplified expendable SSME.

But then the fools at DIRECT started coming out of the woodwork, claiming that the ablative nozzle of the RS-68 would never work on Ares V with the heat from the SRBs....

...Never mind that they had this problem in Apollo, specifically the Saturn V base heating environment was so severe that each F-1 engine had to be covered in about 1,000+ pounds of insulation to work.

Later plans to ground launch S-II stages with SRB boosters (look, Ares V forty years early!), ran into this problem of base heating from SRBs, albeit with the J-2s. Their solution was to design a heat shield that would prevent the J-2s from being fried by the SRB heat.

[MKSheppard]

I predict that SLS will be within schedules and budgets for about a year. Maybe it'll actually run a bit ahead of schedule; as:

• A lot of tough/costly work on 5-Seg and J-2X was done under CxP, providing immediate boost to appearances of viability for SLS.
• The program would be in that phase of development that is cheapish.

However, winter 2012; issues will unexpectedly arise, and the program will be restructured and then killed after a pretty hefty cost increase/overrun on the scope of what occured to JWST.

Mainly I think due to the programmatic costs inherent in redesigning and rechecking everything when you go from the 3 x SSME boattail in the 70 ton version that will fly first, to the 5 x SSME base for the next spiral.

It's just a way for Obama to get certain Senators off his butt, and to defuse the use of NASA as a weapon against him in 2012 in certain very important states.

[Sea Skimmer]

I bet they'll find a way to make raping the shuttles for main engines cost more then buying new ones.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I bet this dies in 2013 regardless of who gets elected President. If the current sitting President is awarded a second term, this delightful bit of vaporware will eventually die a quiet, ignominious death . . . with the killing blow coming in 2017 when the President to follow realizes that the Boondoggle Mk. II is nowhere near ready to begin testing. If a Republican gets elected President, and Tea Party conservatives continue to make inroads in the House and Senate, then the Boondoggle Mk. II is sacrificed upon the Altar of Fiscal Responsibility.

A closer look at the Boondoggle Mk. II reveals that if NASA budgets remain flat (and I currently have no real reason to assume that they won't be,) the first manned version doesn't fly until 2021 (this comes sometime after the ISS is scheduled to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean, by the way,) the rocket will fly twice a year, and the full-up heavy-lift version won't fly until 2030. All of this ignores the fact that NASA doesn't really have a plan for what, exactly, they intend to do with this rocket; suggesting they're taking it about as seriously as I am.

[Sky Captain]

IIRC Russians had cheaper simplified version of SSME for their Energia rocket with dozens of engines still remaining in storage. Since US already buy RD 180 it should be possible to buy or licence for domestic production those engines cutting R&D costs.

Anyway given experiance with Constellation program I have very little faith that this new program will move beyond million dollar power point presentations and maybe some prototypes. There had been dozens of heavy lift rocket studies in the past, if there really were serious incentive to build heavy rocket and go beyonf LEO it would already been done. Besides Space X Falcon Heavy soon will be available and I see no reason why deep space vessel for manned missions to asteorids couldn't be built in LEO from few 50 ton modules launched on Falcon Heavy thus saving billions of $ that would be needed for this new AresV v2.0.

[MKSheppard]

IIRC Russians had cheaper simplified version of SSME for their Energia rocket with dozens of engines still remaining in storage. Since US already buy RD 180 it should be possible to buy or licence for domestic production those engines cutting R&D costs.

You mean NK-33/NK-43? Developed for N-1, now being used as AJ-26 -- Aerojet replaces the cabling and adds a gimbaled nozzle and then pretends it's an American engine.

[Sky Captain]

IIRC Russians had cheaper simplified version of SSME for their Energia rocket with dozens of engines still remaining in storage. Since US already buy RD 180 it should be possible to buy or licence for domestic production those engines cutting R&D costs.

You mean NK-33/NK-43? Developed for N-1, now being used as AJ-26 -- Aerojet replaces the cabling and adds a gimbaled nozzle and then pretends it's an American engine.

No, NK - 33 runs on kerosene, Energia core stage was hydrogen fueled and was powered by 4 RD 0120 engines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0120