As with his excellent dissection of what was wrong with STS, which I really loved, Maciej Ceglowski has written an excellent essay on the Vision for Space Exploration, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and the real impetus behind a Moon and Mars Shot. As…

And “redesign the ET to be a carbon-carbon structure” … you want to put cryogenics in a carbon-carbon? Go right ahead, man … good luck getting that to work.

[I can't discuss what I really want to say here, because it's all ITAR-restricted, and I like being a government contractor. But there are better things to use than ETs, but they're expendable. That's all I'll say.]

What good would an ET be for you in such a situation? None. The ET has structural rigidity in usable situations only when pressurized.

I admire your out-of-the-box thinking. I really do. I just don’t think that it scales as well as you think that it will where the rubber meets the road. If you do—great! DO IT! There’s probably a market for it. It’s just not feasible for the kinds of missions that NASA is trying to do.

Since my job function is morphing, I’ve really got to close comments on this entry. We’re getting ever closer into things that I may or may not be doing, and that’s where this stops being an academic exercise for me and starts becoming a sand table … and that’s where I really have to stop. Sorry.

Of course, why return the ETs to earth anyways? I’m also a fan of using ETs as building blocks for space stations, moon bases, etc. rather than tossing them into the ocean. Take five of the six SSME and have them on a detachable ring bus that drops off after 65% of fuel mass is burned (as the Atlas II did with two of its three engines). Recover those five engines in a suborbital trajectory without need of a TPS, and let the sixth engine drive the payload and tank into orbit (this would also boost your payload capacity by about 35,000 lbs as well). If the sixth central engine is an SSME with a ceramic expendable nozzle, remove the nozzle in orbit, and return the powerhead and turbopump in the bay of a small shuttle of the MAKS/X-38 variety, or leave them in orbit for use in building lunar and martian missions with meat on them.

I’m working all this up in a more formal way, btw, this isn’t just idle speculation….

As to whether NASA should be out of the LEO launch business: maybe. However, if Boeing or Lockheed thought they could do it more efficiently and make money on it, I think they would have made the proposal already. After all, Boeing did think they could do a Space Station better than NASA…

As for contracting: the big issue isn’t in cost-plus contracting, but far more in this whole prime contractor outsourcing business. In creating a single prime for ISS, NASA had Boeing create their own bureaucracy to manage ISS development on NASA’s behalf—essentially subsuming NASA’s responsibility becuase NASA ceded it to them. That was a mistake, but it’s emblematic of the greater shift in government-civilian contracting from 1980 forward: larger orders for fewer models of craft designed to perform more roles. With less contracts out there, competition starved a lot of people out of business, and the survivors acquired the losers to have their capital [which was necessary to their success].

I don’t know that an X-prize system is the way to go, because CPAF contracting can work if NASA is willing to manage contracts in such a way as to control costs. FFP contracting works when the design’s mature, but it’s horrible for development, because the costs of change deltas end up becoming a sizable minority of the entire contract costs.

They should also get out of the practice of cost plus contracting. Instead, go entirely by the X-prize model: issue a big bounty to the first company that accomplishes x or provides product or service x. And just to make sure there is competition, offer a half bounty to the second guy to accomplish it. Let industry decide how they want to approach the problem.

I’d encourage you to reconsider my idea of a volunteer astronaut corps. I know volunteer firemen who dedicate significant portions of their lives to their avocation, and private pilots who are far better pilots than any airline bus driver. Amateur does not mean unskilled.

I don’t know that you can realistically make the dramatic force cuts you suggest, and your concept of a volunteer astronaut corps is ludicrous on its face, given the amount of time spent in training for each flight.

I’d also make the astronaut corps a volunteer organization, like a volunteer fire department: there are plenty of people around the country willing to do it for nothing, if not pay big money for the experience. Our government has no need to pay people for the honor.

That said, I don’t disagree that there’s some, ah, largesse in the STS-related workforce. When one considers that the theory-of-the-moment with the PAL ramp foam is that workers damaged it, well … those workers are unionized.

[Here's where I stop to readily admit that I'm biased against unionized workers in this sphere: not only do I work in a company with a non-union shop, but my father was also the target of striking union workers at Monsanto back in the 1960s in Mississippi.]

I wouldn’t lay all of the cost burden on the unionized workforce, though: there were some significant design choices that reduced any hope of cost savings—choices well outlined by Ceglowski in the linked article above. I’d urge you to read it if you have not already done so.

The new launchers are an improvement safety-wise, but I’ll truly be impressed with it when they lay off a good 5,000-8,000 of you guys as surplusage. THAT will be a measure of the improvement of the new boosters over the shuttle.

Nope, a stack in my parlance is putting everything atop the rocket, just like the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo days. That kind of air boost is not going to work inexpensively, especially for cargo.

Stacks, huh? That means that they’re piggybacked with a cargo jet until they get to some high altitude, and then they kick in the boosters from there? Interesting. I haven’t followed spaceflight stuff too closely in the past, but my interest is developing. Let’s just hope they can get this current bird down… then we can go from there.

The early next-generation launche vehicle designs I’ve seen, Chris, are all Shuttle-derived—but they’re all stacks rather than side-launched. I think those will be good designs at the end of the day.

So, 13 hours down, 11 to go…