[FPSPACE] Ares 5 or Direct?

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi all - 

As Obama's team starts in on NASA, it faces the same situation it faces elsewhere: Ares 1 is trying to burrow in, when the thing is simply a rotten manned launch system.

But Obama's transition team faces a really incongruous situation as regards NASA. First off, 
the NASA Administrator has been in contempt of Congress for the last two years for not
carrying out their instructions given him in the George Brown Jr. amendment. Transition 
team Obama will be working its way through that Congressional correspondence, and after 20 January, 2009 the NASA internal correspondence pertaining to this as well.

The other major incongruity Transition Team Obama faces is more pronounced. The President stated that one of NASA's long term goals is manned exploration of Mars. But the Congress specifically instructed NASA not to spend any money on this. 

Result: confusion.

Which leads to the question at hand, which is the better shuttle derived launch system:
Ares 5 or Direct? Now those who are most intensely focused on manned Mars flight  
uniformly think that Zubrin's Mars Direct architecture is the best way of doing manned 
Mars exploration. They favor a super heavy like the Ares 5, and ATK is trying its damnedest
to burrow in Ares 5 as well. 

I myself think that Zubrin's Mars Direct architecture will not work, due to the mass requirements, among other things.  Instead I think something like Dr. Aldrin's cyclers will have to be developed and funded internationally if manned Mars exploration is ever to be done.  The Direct shuttle derived launch vehicle could be used for the construction of such a cycler as well.

My bottom line thinking right now is that Direct is faster, better, cheaper, and that the EELVs and Falcon 9 will be used for manned launch.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live Hotmail now works up to 70% faster.
http://windowslive.com/Explore/Hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_hotmail_acq_faster_112008
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.friends-partners.org/pipermail/fpspace/attachments/20081201/40406a09/attachment.html