NASA’s Rejuvenation

I do appreciate that the model is so different from Apollo that it takes time and thought to understand what it is about; I did not see it at first myself — but once I got past my preconceptions, I found the logic of this approach overwhelming. This is simply what exploration looks like in a world where the budget doesn’t double for a few years and then halve again. You build a piece at a time and as soon as you can start doing things with the pieces, you do so.

Jeff Greason about the Flexible Path, commenting on Rand Simberg’s superiorly excellent Popular Mechanics piece.

Rand Simberg in the article:

I would claim that in fact, this is the most visionary space policy that the nation has ever had, including Apollo. It finally, forthrightly declares a national goal of large numbers of humanity living off planet, with many of them going on excursions into the solar system, and it harnesses the vital element of private enterprise and competition to make it happen in a way that will drive costs down instead of up.

May I add that yours truly proposed something of a flexible path of his own in 2006, though only for launching.

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FLEX – Flexible Exploration Architecture

I wrote this architecture proposal, FLEX, a few years ago. It analyzes NASA’s approach that the ESAS study picked and notices how most of the mass in a lunar exploration stack in LEO is actually liquid oxygen. By using a propellant depot, the LOX can be lifted with tankers and any launchers imaginable (I wouldn’t use a Pegasus though). The rest of the stack is also naturally divided into about 20 ton chunks: EDS with its hydrogen, the CEV crew vehicle (Orion) and the LSAM lander (Altair).

No new heavy lifters need to be developed, there is enough US, nevermind world launch capability to support a moon exploration program. Launchers can also be improved on the run, because they are not tied to the single use, nor is the use dependant on the single launcher, and because they can fly often, hence improvements are worth the investment. This all could be achieved much sooner and cheaper than the current approach, and is much more robust for the future.

Go read it if you haven’t.

There are some comments at an old Nasaspaceflight.com thread that deal with a lot of the common questions about it.

I really don’t have the faintest idea of the background knowledge level of the readership here so I don’t know how much basics I should give, so feel free to ask in the comments if anything is unclear.

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