Matt Wronkiewicz's Weblog

In a change from the August 12 meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, NASA's Ares I project appears to still be on the table. In their Summary Report, it is included in their Option 3: Baseline Program of Record, which projects a human return to the surface of the Moon in the mid 2020s. This option would require an additional investment of $3 billion per year in NASA's exploration program. In the interest of evaluating this option, I'm going to review what Ares I is supposed to do and the progress it has made, and then look ahead to… Read More

My list of ten of the best ideas I've come across, some of them are a little older than others.

10. DIRECT

DIRECT is NASA's last chance to retain its own crew launch system in the wake of Space Shuttle retirement. It's a derivative of the Space Shuttle External Tank and Solid Rocket Boosters, combined with the Orion space capsule. Given how many pieces of this rocket are flying today, it seems possible to get this operational relatively quickly. Unfortunately, the DIRECT team made some strategic blunders while trying to get their idea accepted, and then came off as paranoid when… Read More

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee recently released a summary of their report. The contents of that report mostly reflects the documents they had previously released and their comments during the public meetings. The report lists the most promising of the combinations of different options for exploring beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). Several of the architectures that they recommended include a new heavy lift vehicle (HLV) called Ares V Light, also known as Ares V Lite. Very little information has been released about this HLV, so I'll document… Read More

The final public meeting of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee was today, and it looks like they did their job extraordinarily well. They really kept their focus on the goal of extending human civilization beyond Earth, and this was reflected in all of the options they are considering. To summarize, their recommended options are: maintain ISS and give up on NASA exploration, spend a little more to explore free space, and spend a little more to explore the moon. All of these options included some common recommendations. First, they called Ares I unaffordable and redundant, and recommended dumping it. Given their findings,… Read More