How can we save the Constellation program?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2IQVZmHn鈥?/a>



How can we force Obama to change his decision regarding NASA's new Constellation program?

(Besides donating NASA a couple of billion dollars).How can we save the Constellation program?The better question is: Do you really want this? It is expensive and badly managed. It is Apollo reloaded, violated all NASA manuals on system engineering, and failed to meet even its own low standards. There had been only little expectations on Ares I-X, and they failed many of them. Obamas adaption of the recommendation of the Augustine commission (no, Obama did not get this idea himself) is the only way out of the hell started by Bush and pursued against sanity by Griffin. Griffin had about 100 chances to heal Constellation, and he rejected each chance. He had even to be forced to consider DIRECT seriously by Obama, after finding typical NASA bureaucracy ways to kill the alternative from the start (=studies with set goal, flawed statistics, make the minimum requirements so bad, that only the NASA way can achieve it).



Do you really want to save this? Keep on going? Despite the lack of direction or the despite the bad management? Of course they had successes. Even the Russian manned lunar landing program had successes. But there are more parallels. The Russian lunar landing program failed of the same reasons that plague Constellation: Bad funding, too short time, bad testing standards, selecting the solution already before the requirements and problems had been identified.



NASA is no employment guarantee for engineers. It never was. And do you now want to change this?



PS: Not existing spacecraft are ALWAYS cheaper than really existing ones. You only know the true price after you started to operate it.How can we save the Constellation program?
The Constellation program would have been much more cost efficient than paying the Russians $51 million for EACH seat on the Soyuz. Also, the engineers who worked on the Constellation program are much more capable than the 3rd party vendors vying to build it--Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX--they are only familiar with LEO, not beyond that.



According to this article, "NASA intends to buy rides for its astronauts on Russian Soyuz vehicles until a new service 鈥?either commercial or government 鈥?materializes. The Russian government charges NASA $51 million for each seat on its Soyuz vehicles. Last May, NASA announced that the new contract allows it to buy 6 seats on Soyuz craft in 2012 and 2013 for a total of $306 million."



If nothing, Obama should consider purchasing the Russian Energia, the Buran I, and II. Each spacecraft is capable of hauling 5,300,000 lbs/payload beyond LEO, to the moon, Mars, etc. It's the Maersk Lines of space. It sits idle and is rusting away because their marketing rep insists on charging $1 million/lb.How can we save the Constellation program?The program was doomed years ago by the Bush administration.



The Bushies took many of the resources for NASA science, and put them into the Man to Mars program, a program that was clearly an overreach. Even so, the funding of that program was inadequate. It was a political dodge by government-hating Republicans to kill off NASA by sucking funds out of the science and Earth-monitoring programs (particularly those pesky climate-monitoring satellites that keep showing global warming) and putting the funds into a program that could subsequently be killed off as too expensive and too dangerous. The Obama administration is saving NASA by reversing those decisions.
Most of us armchair astronomers couldn't build a toy Constellation, much less the real thing. Sitting around shorting stocks isn't going to launch us anywhere. Counting money isn't going to save our mortal souls. I would fight to bring back the Constellation--FTW.How can we save the Constellation program?IMO the question isn't how, but why would you want to? It'll be much cheaper for the gov't to have private corporations push forward, as in total, they have more money and resources available than NASA does.How can we save the Constellation program?
Its inevitable for space to be privatized. Honestly I think corporations will handle the new frontier better than NASA or the Ruskies have. New legislations on this are soon to come.
There is a really cool video on YouTube called "save constellation". Watch it, then go to http://www.goboldlynasa.com and sign the letter.How can we save the Constellation program?
Dump Obama in 2012