Gordon writes, in response to Friday's post:

NASA will have no "man rated" spacecraft after the Shuttle program is terminated, until the "Ares I" launcher and "Orion" crew vehicle (a.k.a. "Apollo on Steroids") come on-line -- scheduled date "no later than 2014" -- actual date of course dependent on whether Congress delays the program to "save money," by spending even more money over a longer period of time.

Meanwhile, during the interim period, NASA astronauts will be completely dependent on Russia's space agency and Proton/Soyuz vehicles to get to and from the International Space Station.

BTW, NASA admins currently plan to close and de-orbit the ISS (or at least, to de-orbit the U.S.-owned components) in the first quarter of 2016 -- and possibly as early as 2015.*

(The Russians, by contrast, now want to separate their modules from the ISS, and keep them in orbit as the core of a new space-station.)

And since the "Ares I" does not have enough Delta-V to get out of LEO, that means that, after the U.S.-owned components of the ISS are de-orbited, the "Ares I" will quite literally have nowhere to go (except, of course, for the Russian-owned former components of the ISS).

Therefore, since it's too expensive to use a "man-rated" vehicle for unmanned launches, that means that after 2016-Q1, the "Ares I" will be effectively "missionless."

So the total effective operational lifetime of the "Ares I" launch vehicle program may very well be as short as a single year -- for a total development cost of at least US$ 12 Billion, and by Peierls' Law of cost overruns, a probably final development cost of US$ 33-38 Billion.**


Brad's footnotes: *The Washington Post article pegs the ISS cost as $100 billion, and "after more than a decade of construction, it is nearing completion and finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be installed by the end of next year." That's $20 billion per year of use after completion, not counting operating expenses.

**AFP says "estimates for the Ares I have skyrocketed from 26 billion dollars in 2006 to 44 billion dollars last year."