On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:29:11 -0600, in a place far, far away, Brian
Thorn made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:50:31 -0500, "jonathan"
wrote:


You'd put people on top of a delta heavy???

Are you nuts?

Why not? Delta IV's only failure so far was an underperformance that
would have been easily compensated for by the Orion SM propulsion.
Seems hugely more sensible to me than riding on top of a "shake,
rattle and roll" Ares I.

That's fine for an otherwise nominal ascent, but the upper stage may
not have the performance needed to prevent black zones during
potential aborts. But that could be fixed with a new upper stage,
which would still be a lot less than the Ares, and without the shake,
rattle and roll.