Dr. Griffin is telling people that there is no need to check his work. Of course not.

In comments, “Red” sums up the problems with Griffin’s approach:

Dr. Griffin doesn’t seem to be aware of what the goals of the Vision for Space Exploration are. The goal is not for NASA to build a rocket, or two rockets. The goal is not to send astronauts to the Moon, or to Mars, or to near-Earth asteroids. Here’s the goal, according to the Vision for Space Exploration:

“Goal and Objectives
The fundamental goal of this vision is to advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests through a robust space exploration program. In support of this goal, the United States will:
• Implement a sustained and affordable human and robotic program to explore the solar system and beyond;
• Extend human presence across the solar system, starting with a human return to the Moon by the year 2020, in preparation for human exploration of Mars and other destinations;
• Develop the innovative technologies, knowledge, and infrastructures both to explore and to support decisions about the destinations for human exploration; and
• Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests”

Note that the space exploration program is just a means to an end. The purpose is to “advance U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests”. Also notice the strong emphasis on innovative technologies, knowledge, infrastructure, and international and commercial participation. Also note that some “decisions about the destinations for human exploration” are left to the future.

To emphasize commercial participation, the document later states:

“Acquire crew transportation to and from the International Space Station, as required, after the Space Shuttle is retired from service.” (Note that “Acquire” doesn’t mean “Design, Build, and Operate”).

“Pursue commercial opportunities for providing transportation and other services supporting the International Space Station and exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.”

The Ares-based plan has nothing to do with any of this. Unlike EELVs or new commercial launchers, Ares rockets don’t support U.S. economic interests. The’re government rockets, so they can’t capture commercial launch business, or launch commercial satellites. They also aren’t useful for U.S. national security launches or payloads. They also aren’t useful for science payloads beyond astronaut missions (Ares V class science missions are too expensive).

The Ares rocket plan doesn’t involve international participation. It takes money away from the robotic exploration program mentioned above and described in detail in the VSE. The Ares rockets are too expensive to develop and operate, and hence fail the VSE “sustained and affordable” criteria above. Ares rockets are too expensive to allow space infrastructure like the VSE mentions. Even if Ares I and V were kept, they could incorporate in-space fueling to bring in commercial participation and spur the U.S. launch market (and as a side benefit dramatically increase payload to the Moon), but they don’t. The Ares plan under Griffin didn’t fund COTS-D commercial crew transport needed by the VSE (see above) – the recent stimulus package partial funding related to commercial crew transport came after Griffin. The Ares program is intended to break as little ground as possible technologically to reduce development risk, so the innovation mentioned in the VSE is gone. Innovation in other areas is drastically reduced to fund Ares (you don’t see very many robotic ISRU demos on the Moon, for example, or reusable space transport components in ESAS, in spite of that approach being central to the kinds of economic, security, and science benefits described here by Dr. Paul Spudis and Dennis Wingo).

Hey, but other than that, it’s a great plan.

[Early afternoon update]

In looking at this analysis, while I knew that ESAS was missing much of the Aldridge recommendations and the VSE itself, I hadn’t realized how almost completely orthogonal it is to them until I saw it all in one place like this. Was the Bush administration unaware of how far off Griffin had taken the plan, or were they indifferent? I know that if I had been the president, I’d have asked for an evaluation by the Aldridge team immediately upon announcement of ESAS/Constellation, scoring it against their own criteria (and we paid very close attention to those criteria when performing the CE&R studies), because it was a radical departure from previous anticipated plans. And I’d have likely forced a course correction on it. It would be worth an interview with Marburger to find out just what was going on.

My suspicion is that they just didn’t pay much attention to it, once the policy was in place, and they had an administrator who was supposed to know what he was doing. It just wasn’t a policy priority in the context of the other problems. Which isn’t surprising, of course, because as I’ve long pointed out, space isn’t important, and hasn’t been for over forty years.

I’ve often noted that, had the Bush administration been truly serious about the VSE, they would have at least attempted to create a new agency to carry it out, because NASA simply carries too much bureaucratic and pork-laden baggage from its Cold-War origins. This would be similar to what happened in the eighties, when the Reagan/Bush administration realized that they couldn’t count on the Air Force to do missile defense properly, and set up SDIO to report directly to the SecDEF.

Anyway, Frank Sietzen asks the question today, if you were building a new space agency from scratch, what would it look like?

The latest word is that the new administrator is going to be Charles Bolden. I remain disturbed by the Abbey connection. It will be interesting to see what Augustine comes up with, and how it’s received.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s the NBC story.