Rube Goldberg, Take Two

Why is NASA so wedded to those solid rocket boosters?

Yeah, yeah, people are still saying that NASA should use the Delta IV or perhaps the Atlas 5 and reduce the bloat of the CEV, and there are all of the counterarguments about the underpowered upper stages, lofted trajectories, ultra-high G abort reentries, and so on.

But the EELV's are families of vehicles, some in operation and some on PowerPoint slides. If we restrict ourselves to the Delta IV side of the equation and LH2-LO2 propellant, the obvious choices are the RS-68 engine for ground-started parallel lower stages, clusters, if needed, of the high-expansion nozzle and zero-G restartable RL-10 and derivatives for the upper stage, and whatever Saturn-esque mix and match of clustered tanks -- Shuttle ET, EELV CCB -- to get the job done.

NASA can save face and spend the taxpayer dollar and employ its people developing its own vehicles instead of using current EELV configurations, but the bottom line for me right now is RS-68, RL-10. Heck, develop just one oversized launcher to deal with any weight growth of CEV -- it will certainly be less than a Shuttle Orbiter even after bloat. Even though it is not "energy efficient", the one vehicle solution may be cheap enough if purchased in quantitiy. The RS-68's and RL-10's could be purchased in quantity and help costs of the EELV program without, gasp, having to use EELVs to launch crews.

But what is this obsession with a solid rocket first stage? Does the contractor making them have some blackmail on somebody?

Let's hope someone drives a stake through this thing before it ends up being a 100 billion dollar boondoggle like the Space Station.

I've read that something like 9000 jobs will be going away when the Shuttle is retired. So this could only get worse.

The station only costs 35 or so billion. The 100BN argument is a straw-argument.

The 100 billion number is from double counting the shuttle launch costs.

The 100 billion number is from double counting the shuttle launch costs.

How is that "double counting"? You can't ignore the transportation costs associated with assembling the station. If you want to deduct non-station Shuttle flights, you could reduce it some, but not by very much.

Rand,

You and I both know it would most likely still be flying in circles anyway. That money would have still been spent. At least it was doing something more exciting that watch ants turn tiny screws in zero-g. This is not a 100BN that would have been saved but ~35BN if the station program never happened.

If you are going to count it against station construction, count it as a marginal cost because as you have pointed out before, it costs 3-4 billion for the fleet to sit grounded doing nothing.

Either we have a very expensive station program with a near-free shuttle program or we count the shuttle program as a line item and dock the station program say 150 million per flight.

To add: To have saved that full 100BN would have basically meant having to scrap the entire shuttle program when we decided we were not building the station.

To have saved that full 100BN would have basically meant having to scrap the entire shuttle program when we decided we were not building the station.

Indeed, this is why I too price the ISS at $100 plus billion. We could have discontinued the shuttle back in the early 90's, if it weren't for the ISS.

Indeed, this is why I too price the ISS at $100 plus billion. We could have discontinued the shuttle back in the early 90's, if it weren't for the ISS.>

Yes and with that marvelous forward thinking Clinton I administration that money would have blackened the sky with x vehicles and we would today have tourists standing on the sands of Mars.

Yea right.

Dennis, that's not the point. Kurt is correct about the price tag of the ISS, based on the notion that the shuttle would not have continued flying if it were not for the ISS. Whether another project might have been a more useful expenditure of funds is impossible to say, because we didn't go down that road.

I could easily see NASA turning the Ares into just such another money- and time-wasting boondoggle, particularly considering the kludging that has been going on.

Anyway comparing the ISS to Ares I & Constellation is too harsh. Ares I has already gone far beyond ISS in s/$ (that's "silliness per dollar"; got to have a proper metric! ^_^).

You can't separate out Shuttle costs from ISS costs. They are, combined, the costs that we have decided to pay, advertently or not, for a human spaceflight program for the past three and a half decades.

1) There was no exigent circumstance to cause a shut-down of the Shuttle in the early/mid 1990s.
But if ISS had not existed, Columbia -- a non-ISS mission, ironically -- would have killed it.

2) The real tragedy of the $100B ISS+post 1993 Shuttle program is that having learned something about on-orbit assembly and LEO operations... we have now jetisoned that expensive education to go back to Heavy Lift Uber Alles.