I had heard last Thursday that some kind of announcement on the CEV contract was imminent, expected any day. According to Keith Cowing, there will be some word this afternoon. I'll update when I hear something.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I'm guessing they're waiting for the market to close at 4:30 so they don't influence late traders.

[Update at 3:20 PM EDT]

In this Reuters piece that quotes Jim Albaugh of Boeing as saying he expects an announcement today, Dr. Griffin says something at the Paris Air Show that I find a little disturbing:

"We have enough money to put people back on the moon in that [2015-2020] timeframe," he said. "The model that I have is that we should build a lunar outpost similar to the kinds of multinational outposts we have in Antarctica."

Antarctica is a very bad model, for two reasons. First of all, Antarctica is basically off limits to mineral exploitation, a precedent that would be disastrous if applied to the moon and, in the words of the infamous Moon Treaty, "other celestial bodies." Second, Antarctica is focused primarily on scienctific research. Such a mindset isn't necessarily conducive to the other uses to which a base might be put.

Basically, it sounds like he wants to dust off his old plans from the early 1990s for "First Lunar Outpost" or FLO, that he developed before he left NASA, just before the president's father's Space Exploration Initiative died.

I just think that by the year 2015, it's going to be very clear that the future, and probably present, of space transportation will not lie in putting up throwaway capsules on throwaway rockets, whether Shuttle derived, or EELV derived. What he's proposing is just picking up where Apollo left off, but there's no reason to think that that will be any more sustainable than Apollo ultimately was. It's certainly unlikely to be much more affordable.

Then there's this:

NASA is weighing up competing bids for the so-called Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the successor to the space shuttle, which will be retired in 2010. The new vehicle is expected to be compatible with the International Space Station and to play a role in a manned mission to the moon.

This is a little misleading. It's not going to succeed the Shuttle in the sense that it will perform all the same functions as Shuttle does. In that sense, there will never (praise the heavens) be a successor to the Shuttle, because its overspecification was one of the things that made it such a programmatic disaster.

Also, the "expected to be compatible with the ISS" is a new requirement, not addressed in any of the proposals submitted, because it wasn't required at the time the RFP came out (a result of the fact that Griffin hadn't had time to influence it, being newly arrived). But now the first task of the contractors (and it would be surprising if that turns out to be anyone other than the Boeing/Northrop-Grumman team and the Lockmart team) will almost certainly be to redesign their respective concepts to satisfy this need.

[Update at 4:35]

Keith Cowing is saying that Lockmart has won something. I don't see anything at their web site yet. That doesn't (yet) mean that Boeing/Northrop-Grumman hasn't, of course.

All MSM articles about space are written with so little detail, confused concepts and ideas that I'm frustrated each time I read one. They don't do their homework either because they're lazy and\or that their editors are so dense they know they don't need to be clear.

> Also, the "expected to be compatible with the ISS" is a new requirement,

Hardly new. To quote President George W. Bush on Jan 14, 2004: "The Crew Exploration Vehicle will be capable of ferrying astronauts and scientists to the Space Station after the shuttle is retired."

It may not have been included in the RFP, but the secret to winning government contracts is to understand the unwritten requirements. (X-33?)

JJS: The "MSM" writes stories they think their readers want to read. So would you if that's how you made your living. Most people don't know squat about space travel, so there's every reason to expect the media they are willing to buy to reflect that. The primary objective of the commercial media is to make money; education is a secondary byproduct. Blogs just substitute one person's biases and ego for profits.

Billg,

Yes, the MSM are ratings-driven, hence things like the wildly imbalanced reporting on Iraq... you can only trust them to report things in the most sensational manner. However, I'd disagree with your blogs remark. While a blog *can* be driven by an individual's ego, it has a built-in checks/balances that the MSM will likely never have. 1) You can usually look back to the URLs cited and decide for yourself about things; and 2) the blog's host can be (and generally is) quickly corrected via the comments section if he/she/they screw up.

- Eric.

"What he's proposing is just picking up where Apollo left off, but there's no reason to think that that will be any more sustainable than Apollo ultimately was. It's certainly unlikely to be much more affordable."

Apollo's lack of sustainability was due to the pie-in-the-sky promises made by the shuttle program. The shuttle was to be more reliable, cheaper, safer, and carry the same payload to the same orbit.

They failed at every single major program objective. It was significantly more expensive, carried far less payload, less safely, less reliably to a lower orbit. It never fit into any grand plan of space exploration. It was a bastardized combination of a space station and launch vehicle. It did neither job well. It's lack of payload capability has kept us from all manned space objectives beyond LEO, and ham-strung most unmanned interplanetary missions.

The shuttle was an utter failure. The sooner it dies, the better.

Personally I would have found it interesting if they tried to evolve Saturn V instead in the old times. Make the upper stage nuclear electric/thermal powered, maybe solar, etc. Try out concepts like SASSTO. More incremental changes, instead of the brave leap into the unknown which was the Shuttle.

> It was significantly more expensive, carried far less payload, less safely, less reliably to a lower orbit. It
> never fit into any grand plan of space exploration.

Can we please put to rest the myth that Apollo was cheaper or safer than the Shuttle. It's not supported by the numbers. Neither Apollo 1 nor Apollo 13 were "reliable."

Apollo also allowed fewer people to explore space than Shuttle did, although the exploration might have been more "grand."

Apollo's lack of sustainability was due to the pie-in-the-sky promises made by the shuttle program.

That's complete and ahistorical nonsense. The Shuttle was a disaster, but it nothing to do with the unsustainability of Apollo, which died years before the Shuttle even started. The decision to end it was made in 1968.

You seriously believe that they cancelled the Saturn V because it simply did not turn them on anymore? So they thought, "ok, we've done the Moon thing and this rocket isn't fun anymore, so let's cancel it?" You actually think the world ever worked that way?

You seriously believe that they cancelled the Saturn V because it simply did not turn them on anymore? So they thought, "ok, we've done the Moon thing and this rocket isn't fun anymore, so let's cancel it?"

No, I don't believe that, and I've never said that I did. That's a very strange strawman.

They never did it because it was "fun," or because it "turned them on." They did it to beat the Russians to the moon. Once it became clear that they were going to do that, the program had served its purpose. Lyndon Johnson cancelled it, because of budget pressures from Vietnam and The Great Society.

Shuttle didn't come along until late in the first Nixon administration, when they were worried about the downturn in jobs from the ending of Apollo, so they came up with a new project to staunch the bleeding at NASA and its contractors, particularly in California, his home state.

Go read a little history.

How about I just live it instead?

How about I just live it instead?

I'd say fine, but if you did, you must not have been paying much attention, because your version of history and that of space historians is quite at odds.

>You seriously believe that they cancelled the Saturn V because it simply did not turn them on anymore? So they thought, "ok, we've done the Moon thing and this rocket isn't fun anymore, so let's cancel it?" You actually think the world ever worked that way?

Apollo and the Saturn V were cancelled because they'd served their purpose- they'd beaten the Russians to the Moon. They were also cancelled because, even by Shuttle standards, they cost an ungodly amount of money- the Saturn V launch price on Encyclopedia Astronautica is $431 million in 1967 dollars, which my inflation calculator tells me is about $2.5 billion today. That figure should be handled with care, since I don't know exactly what it represents, but it does indicate that, for all that its per-pound cost may not have been that high, the Saturn had a very high base cost that made it unsustainable in the long run.

It's also worth noting that we don't really know how reliable Apollo was in practice. We know how reliable it was designed to be, but we also know that it had two serious accidents in 15 flights (Apollos 1 and 13) as well as a number of other minor problems (notably the Apollo 16 SPS, which came close to scrubbing the mission).

Rand- was the decision made in '68? I thought the peak year for Apollo budgets was 1966, but it's been a while since I checked.

I don't recall the exact year for peak spending (though that wouldn't necessarily correspond to the year that the decision was made), but I thought that it was essentially cancelled (in terms of procuring new hardware for follow-on missions) in 1967 or 1968. From that point on the program was running on what was already built.

If lots of words made you correct, you certainly would be. At no point did anyone ever think we were done with space exploration simply because Apollo had achieved its goals. Instead, we assumed something better was coming along. It never occured to us in those days that an abortion like the shuttle could possibly occur, or that if it did, it would continue to fail for as long as it has.

If lots of words made you correct, you certainly would be.

That's one of the funniest things I've read recently.

What makes me (and Jeff) correct is "lots of words" about the actual history that are correct. You have fewer words on that subject, that are demonstrably incorrect. Correctness doesn't correlate in any way with word count, in my experience.

> At no point did anyone ever think we were done with space exploration
> simply because Apollo had achieved its goals.

Space exploration was never the purpose of Apollo. The purpose was to land a man on the Moon -- *one* man -- and return him safely to the Earth, and do it before the Russians did. Once the US had beaten the Soviets to the Moon, there was no need to beat them to the Moon again. Yes, they were done.

Wow, this is just like work. Trying to explain the obvious to those who would rather not believe it. Have it your way. The shuttle just happened along after Saturn V. Golly gee, no one ever thought of doing anything else in space before y'all came along.

Okay, to separate the points I (and others) have been making:

1) The decision to cancel Apollo/Saturn V and the decision to proceed with the Space Shuttle were separated by several years and a Presidential Administration. Regardless of the exact year, the decision to shut down the Saturn production lines was made during the Johnson Administration, which effectively limited the number of Saturn flights that could be made- as I recall, we could have gotten out to Apollo 20 if we'd used every Saturn V. One was used to launch Skylab instead, and the other two ended up as mankind's most expensive lawn furniture.

The decision to proceed with the Shuttle came out of the 1969 Space Task Group under the Nixon Administration. Nixon started the program and was responsible for most of the decisions that crippled it, such as the decision to use a partially-reusable configuration. (IIRC, the DoD alliance that led to the oversized wings was later) The point is, the decision to cancel Apollo was not so that we could proceed with the Shuttle. It was to end Apollo, pure and simple. I have a hunch that if LBJ had gotten his way, there never would have been a Shuttle, but I can't prove it.

2) Big dumb boosters are not as good as they appear. Sure, they have good per-pound launch costs, and they let you loft things in big units, but they also have high base pricetags. In other words, a Saturn V might cost less per pound than a smaller booster, but it will cost far, far more per launch. It doesn't really lower the cost of access to space if you can launch for, say, $100 per pound but have to pay $2.5 billion to get the booster off the ground.

Okay, I'll stop clogging your comments Rand, I promise. Sorry for length and all that.