NASA Exploration Systems Architecture Study Final Report, November 2005:
"The Emperor was named the new NASA Administrator in April 2005. With concurrence from Congress, he immediately set out to restructure NASA’s Exploration Program by making its priority to accelerate the development of the CEV to reduce or eliminate the planned gap in U.S. human access to space. He established a goal for the CEV to begin operation in 2011 and to be capable of ferrying crew and cargo to and from the ISS."
Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, August 11, 2008:
The official IOC for an Ares I crew launch vehicle able to send a crew of six to the International Space Station (ISS) in the Orion crew exploration vehicle is March 2015.
We suggest you ask yourselves, "Are you better off than you were three years ago?"
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2 comments:
Good to see Nasawatch is picking up on your lead!
The funny thing is that if he had simply decided to fly on an EELV he would have had the resources and payload margins to accelerate the Orion command module so that the 2011 date might have been met. With an EELV there is no need to have a large service module since you actually get delivered to orbit- not to a suborbital trajectory. The choice of the ARES I design with its low performance capability forced complexity and mass into the Orion which is completely unnecessary for orbital operations. This of course added years to development. The Emperor's fixation on lunar objectives that are a decade away instead of near term needs will be seen as a fundamental error. It will end up creating a long gap in crewed lift capability, undermine the real launch industry in the US and make us pump more money into the Russian space industry to make more hardware to lift our astronauts. A more self destructive approach would be hard to visualize.
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