Leopold Stotch wrote:
kT wrote:
Leopold Stotch wrote:

Who is this creationist that is in charge of judging scientific
projects?

President George W. Bush, apparently.

Hence, the problems.

I am aware that Bush considers himself to be a Christian but have not
heard him say that he is a creationist. The two are not synonymous and
given that I believe that he attends a Methodist church there is a good
chance that he is not a creationist. Of course, I might be wrong.

I suppose typing in Bush and creationism or intelligent design into the
search bar is out of the question. Intelligent design is creationism.

How else do you explain the Ares I? I just don't have faith in Mr.
Griffin's bias. I was a little suspicious when Bush sent mankind on a
journey out into the cosmos. I thought we already lived in the cosmos.

Anyways, I wrote a white paper in a futile attempt to salvage Mr.
Griffin's career, and whatever is salvageable from the ESAS mess.

I submitted this white paper as a COTS proposal, in order to force it
into evaluation. I'm guessing a 30 day evaluation process begins
tomorrow, and will for run thirty days, until the 8th of February.

The step up from burning up automobile and outboard motor engines, to
burning up rocket engines, isn't really all that big - I'm ready for it.

Not that we really need more launch vehicles, but they have to spend
that money, and I'm certainly in need of it. As far as the other COTS
proposals are concerned, I believe they are only interested in systems
which include a launch vehicle, and that narrows it down considerably.

I did manage to dig up some dirt on Orbital's Taurus II, and Ed Kyle has
been working on it. It appears that it will be using a pair of NK-33s.

The wildcard is Andrews. It looks like they may be thinking about using
four half height ATK GEMs or some such thing, which would allow them to
use clustered smaller engines in the first stage core, and avoid NK-33s,
or they may be just planning on using the NK-33s, which would give them
a considerable edge in payload capabilities over the Orbital offering.

Of course, PlanetSpace was of the right mind to come up with something.

Right now my group is endorsing Andrews if our proposal is a priori
rejected, but I notice Doug Cooke is doing the deciderizing, so I'm
guessing Mr. Griffin is starting to think long and hard about this.

I'm envisioning a large number of NK-33 type vehicles feeding an
equatorial space station composed of clustered up Delta Vs, with the
very large nosecone aeroshield as emergency lifeboat and cargo return.

So, in summary, there are four non-EELV COTS proposals on the table, in
addition to already funded SpaceX contributions - Falcon 9 and Dragon :

Orbital - Taurus II (they could probably fund this themselves, too bad
Kistler blew all that money)

Andrews - Hercules

PlanetSpace/ATK - Athena III (Griffin may go for this just out of spite)

TLE/Formation - Delta V (cutting edge technology demonstration flight -
it may need boosters or auxiliary propulsion to limit the acceleration)

Is this a fair and balanced perspective for you? I was expecting many
more proposals, but I'm guessing people were just fed up with it.