Final options from the Augustine Committee

Matt — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:06:57 +0000

Thanks to the committee’s Twitter feed and some folks over at NASASpaceFlight.com, I was able to piece together the final options that will appear in the committee’s initial report, to be presented to the White House on Friday. In its final report, the committee will not recommend one particular option, but will simply present the facts. Each of these options represents the combination of several architectural choices, adjusted for budget and schedule. Some architectural choices were discarded entirely. Several options will be presented as “for reference only”, but may be selected by the President anyway, as they are the only ones to fit within the budget. Here is the final list:

2: Program of Record (POR), adjusted for risk, constrained to the FY10 budget (for reference only, not executable)
3B: ISS focused, commercial crew, constrained to the FY10 budget (for reference only, no exploration program)
3B$: ISS focused, commercial crew, “plus up” budget
5$: Lunar sorties, shuttle derived, “plus up” budget
6$: Deep space, dual Ares V light, “plus up” budget
7$: Deep space, commercial HLV, “plus up” budget
7S$: Deep space, shuttle derived, “plus up” budget

I’ll attempt to boil down the differences in this table:

	Recommended	ISS life	Crew to LEO	HLV	IOC
2		2015	Ares I	Ares V	2028
3B		2020	Commercial	Ares V	2028
3B$	•	2020	Commercial	Ares V	2023
5$	•	2020	Shuttle/Comm.	STS-derived	?
6$	•	2020	Commercial	Ares V “light”	2023
7$	•	2020	Commercial	Commercial	2021
7S$	•	2020	Commercial	STS-derived	2022

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Final options from the Augustine Committee