"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
On 19 Sep 2005 15:08:09 -0700, in a place far, far away, "Ed Kyle"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

OK, is anyone other than NASA fanboys here actually excited about this
plan?


The weak link in this plan is the missing data in between the landing
and the blast off.


'Four astronauts then would fly to the moon and descend to the surface
in the lander for a one-week stay, leaving the CEV alone in orbit.

...............[What are they going to do on the Moon?].......

After completing their initial four-to-seven-day mission, the astronauts
would blast off, rendezvous with the CEV and return to a parachute
landing in the western United States."



I find that at best incompetent, and at worst suspicious.
Do they have some unspoken/military reason for doing this???
When a govt agency asks the taxpayers to shell out
a hundred billion, the first and obvious question is
....why. Nasa can't answer that question so the
response should be NO.

And with the next administration facing huge deficits this
plan seems dead-on-arrival to me.












I think it provides a good roadmap for NASA to follow for
the next how-ever-many years. It is a great improvement
to the space shuttle era NASA framework.

This is a plan that could very well, over time, lead to a
smaller, more focused NASA.

More focused, certainly, but with the increasing budget, and the
predilection to do more in house and less contracting, how is it
smaller?

It is a plan that produces
something useful in the near-term - the CEV and CLV tools
that will replace shuttle and could by themselves, in
concert with commercial launch services and international
space station partners, serve as the framework for a long-
term human space program.

For exactly the same (or more) cost as the Shuttle program.

http://www.transterrestrial.com/arch...29.html#005729