The original plan by the administration was much better, but certain political forces that claim to be libertarian insisted on the SLS in order to keep the shuttle pork flowing. The result is a stupid bill, that is going to hurt US human spaceflight for years to cdme.The Authorization Act, which Obama signed, allocated $500M for CCDev this year. And $2.65B for SLS and $1.4B for MPCV. Now along comes Obama with his FY2012 budget request, completely disrespecting the compromise reached between all parties (you know how difficult that is, right?) and slashing SLS/MPCV while jacking up CCDev. (What part of "commercial" didn't you people understand?) So the Senate restored CCDev to its previously-agreed amount and restored a small amount of SLS/MPCV funding - though nowhere near enough to bring it back to baseline (perhaps because they had seen the cost estimates, which are better than expected).
A non starter.What's your opinion of ATK and Astrium's Liberty?
1. It would be too big and too expensive to be a viable option for commercial crew.
2. CCDev is looking for a complete system of launcher and spacecraft. None of the contenders with spacecraft has shown any interest in launching on Liberty.
So Liberty would probably just be able to be an alternative launcher for Orion and then we have Constellation all over again...
It would probably alos be very expensive. I know that ATK claims that they can do it for cheaper, but they always do. It is the usual way of getting fat government contracts that ATK is really good at. You vastly under estimate the real cost and then just overrund and overrun it.
Seen it before.
So naa, not impressed at all by Liberty.
I have heard all that before. I dont think that this is quite so true, since it did work quite fine for other things.As for the SAA thing, you can't build a contractual relationship on SAAs. They are trying to rework the fixed-price contracting arrangement so as to approximate as closely as possible the freedom afforded by an SAA, without giving up the ability to set requirements at the level they feel is necessary.