Pet Project?
NASA is steadfastly sticking by its launch vehicles, claiming they remain the cheapest and fastest way to space. Before settling on the Ares I, NASA says it evaluated hundreds of configurations, including a rocket stack that is close to the Jupiter 120.
But some within the space agency complain that the Ares I is a pet project of NASA boss Michael Griffin and former exploration chief Scott Horowitz. Before coming to NASA, Griffin, an aerospace engineer, co-authored a technical paper for the Planetary Society that proposed a rocket strikingly similar to the Ares I. Horowitz had previously promoted an Ares-like concept while a senior executive at ATK Thiokol, the manufacturer of the solid rocket booster that subsequently became the first stage of the Ares I.
“The fix was in from the beginning,” says a NASA contract engineer involved in the process. “Other configurations never had a chance.” Griffin declined an interview request from Popular Mechanics. However, during his October Astronautical Society speech he challenged these negative images of NASA: “If it is not obvious that objective expertise underlies NASA decisions and actions, then the civil space program will grind to a halt in response to one searching examination after another by various other governmental entities which claim the right of agency oversight, and can make it stick.”
Inside NASA, some disaffected staffers say they feel pressure to support the Ares I. The anonymous former NASA engineer says that there is a culture of intolerance for negative feedback among senior NASA management. “The attitude is, ‘Do what I tell you, don’t tell me what can be done,’?” he says. “Data doesn’t matter. All that matters is the decision that’s already been made.” The engineer says he received bureaucratic harassment for voicing concerns about the Ares I; last summer he decided to leave NASA.
Some veterans of NASA, such as former associate administrator Scott Pace, say that many young NASA engineers lack experience with developing new hardware. Instead, they have experience only in conducting research or in operating hardware that already exists. This, Pace says, adds to the “naiveté” of those who feel their solutions are unheeded. “There were lots of these technical fights during Apollo,” he notes. “What is different now is the modern communications and computational power on people’s desktops. People can come up with plausible-seeming analysis and design in ways they couldn’t during the 1960s and 1970s.”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4295233.html?page=2Статья большая, в двух словах - в самом NASA спонтанно возникла группа из примерно 70 инженеров, которые очень недовольны планом разработки ракеты Ares I. Они говорят, что бывший руководитель NASA
Michael Griffin и ещё один босс
Scott Horowitz - вдвоём придумали продвигать проект Ares I - без какого-либо конкурса и всячески подaвляя критику внутри агентства.
Эти недовольные инженеры NASA, оказывается уже много лет предлагают собственные проекты на основе использования частей от программы Shuttle - Jupiter Direct.
DIRECT is a proposal outlining an alternative architecture for supporting the Vision for Space Exploration.
The cornerstone of the proposal is to replace the two new Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles with a single "Jupiter" launch system. The Jupiter system would have greater commonality with the existing Space Shuttle systems in order to reduce costs, schedule and technical requirements.
~ Основная идея проекта DIRECT - заменить две новые пусковые системы Ares I и Ares V одной пусковой системой "Jupiter".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRECT