[FPSPACE] Ares 1/ Ares 5 or Direct: Surprise

[E.P. Grondine]

For all of you in the cheaper seats - 

In their PR campaign Griffin and Thiokol continue to try to frame this question as either Ares 1 or continuing Shuttle, while in truth the option space is far different, and while the general public may not know it, we do. Today Thiokol began promoting the line how good Ares 5 will be for space based astronomy, hoping to add astronomers to the Zubrinite Mars Nuts as their base of support for Ares 1/Ares 5. 

Ongoing Thiokol PR lines are the amount of money already spent (wasted) on Ares 1, and how Ares 1 will come out on top in any comparison with Direct, a comparison they want done now, while their supporters are still in place.

Two key points:
Bolden lobbied for Thiokol.
Gration worked on Obama's space policy statement.

It is claimed that Gration has no NASA experience, even though he worked as a White House Fellow with Hans Marks. And the fact is that Gration had detailed space experience as a user of space products while commanding, and knows Defense space issues thoroughly. 

Gration also knows his physics and engineering. Anybody want to speculate on his involvement with members of the Direct team (the folks trained by von Braun's men)? Anybody want to try to parse Gration's involvement in Direct out of the Obama space policy statement?

Perhaps Thiokol counts on no one knowing how vicious they can be, but then Space Team Obama has a lot of experience. It looks like they are simply choosing not to engage with Thiokol at this point, preferring to simply wait until Griffin's appointment expires. 

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas (despite its faults due to my stroke, truly a great book, in my opinion - write me for details on the fpspace special)










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