18 thoughts on “The Constellation Empire”

  3. Anyone remember when NewSpace was the great hope that NASA would wither away and a real industry, with real customers and real profits, would take us to the stars? Now we have “commercial”, whatever that means.

    1. Its NewSpace doublespeak for government subsidies. The space industry equivalent of selling the government shovels to dig a hole that doesn’t need digging.

      1. Huh? Are you really trying to say that government doesn’t need its satellites and probes launched, ground and ocean imagery, or cargo and crew at the International Space Station?

        1. Michael,

          The main purpose for the ISS was to justify the Shuttle after Challenger. The main purpose it serves today is to justify subsidies for COTS, CCDev, CCP or whatever the name of the program is today. Yes, it is the space industry equivalent of selling the government shovels to dig a hole that doesn’t need digging.

    2. “NewSpace” is just a marketing term the Space Frontier Foundation came up with. The SFF leadership never understood innovation. They ignored the X-Prize as long as they could. They refused to publicly support Centennial Challenges, CRUSR, Zero Gee Zero Taxes — anything that wasn’t directly related to ISS or Return to the Moon. Bob Werb thinks suborbital means weather balloons, and now he’s deliberately destroying Teachers in Space, out of pure greed and stupidity.

      In the long run, ISS will be as relevant as the mainframe battle between IBM and DEC. The useless low-cost suborbital vehicles will change the world, just as useless “toy” computers did.

  4. What possible advantage does that Frankenrocket abortion, the Liberty rocket, possess versus the plain-jane stock version of the Ariane V? Sure the Frankenrocket would make money for ATK, and that surely is an advantage for them. But why not just plop a manned vehicle atop the existing Ariane V launch stack instead?

  5. US pols don’t want crew to ride on a wholly Euro rocket, so regular Ariane is out. Then, one of Dr. Griffin’s disciples can come in as Administrator and ‘have’ Constellation back, almost as it started (assuming Romney gets in and his advisory group isn’t radically changed. Eric A. can’t change its direction alone.)

    To expensive to fly? Nah, just dump the ISS and pretend that money that doesn’t exist will come out of the ether. Waste another generation or two.

    NASA’s one of the most shameful things in the government, but as Rand would correctly point out, space is too unimportant for anyone to notice. And with Constellation version 2, it’s guaranteed to remain so barring private developments (Of course if NASA is given de facto authority over human space regs, those may be dead too.)

    Just pray for SpaceX next Saturday at 4:55 am. Pray very hard indeed, cause “Liberty’ is the perfect nonsense to turn to on the HIll if there is any significant failure.

    1. Interesting how everyone blames Griffin for this.

      Ariane is built by EADS. The CEO of the EADS North American division is — dumroll, please! — Sean O’Keefe.

      So much for the meme that O’Keefe would have gone in a radically different direction from Griffin.

      2. Remember the arrow of time. He wasn’t the CEO of EADS when he was NASA Administrator.

        1. Ae you being ironic? O’Keefe was not Administrator of NASA when he did all the things people imagine he would have done. Those occurred after he left office and in some parallel universe. Does the arrow of time goes sideways?

      3. Edward,

        You are missing a key difference and ignoring history.

        Unlike Dr. Griffin, Sean O’Keefe didn’t pretend to be chief engineer. He was more then happy to let the tech folks sort things out for themselves. That is why there were so many Roadmap Committees. By contrast when Dr. Girffin came in he just gave them the answer (Constellation) and left it to those below him to justify it.

    2. Charles,

      Yes, unless its a perfect flight Congress will be all over SpaceX like a cackle of Hyenas.

      Pity that its no longer seems possible to regard the flight for what actually is, a test flight where failures are allowed and a neccessary part of the learning process.

Comments are closed.