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" It has long been conventional wisdom, going all the way back to Apollo, that heavy lift was a prerequisite for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, but this summer has seen several cracks start to appear in that consensus. First, partly as a result of white papers circulated among its members in the last few weeks, the Augustine panel itself has championed the concept of propellant depots. But defenders of the current approach have claimed that the ideas aren&amp;#039;t fleshed out, and are too complex and expensive. This week, at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics annual meeting on space in Pasadena, Calif., several technical papers have more to say on the subject of getting back to the moon with existing launch systems. While Boeing and Lockheed Martin can smell the Ares blood in the water, they still both have lucrative contracts for the Constellation program (Orion for Lockheed Martin, and the Ares I upper stage for Boeing), and they can&amp;#039;t afford to upset the apple cart unless they know that the program is definitely dead. Three years ago, Lockheed Martin got itself into hot water with the former administrator, Mike Griffin, at the AIAA meeting in San Jose, where they held a joint press conference with Bigelow Aerospace announcing a study to &amp;quot;human rate&amp;quot; the Atlas V to service Bigelow&amp;#039;s planned facilities. Griffin reportedly called upper management there to complain about the potential threat these plans posed to maintaining political support for Ares. But Lockheed Martin and Boeing&amp;#039;s young joint offspring, the United Launch Alliance (ULA), has little to lose. Like the United Space Alliance that operates the Shuttle and ISS for NASA, the company was formed in a shotgun wedding at the request of the Air Force three years ago to consolidate manufacturing and launch operations of Boeing&amp;#039;s Delta and Lockheed Martin&amp;#039;s Atlas rockets, in the hope that it would save money. The new venture has military, commercial and even NASA customers, but only for unmanned missions. It was shut out of the human spaceflight program four years ago when Griffin made the decision to instead have NASA develop and operate the Ares vehicles. The papers ULA is presenting this week show the kind of innovation and boldness that NASA has been avoiding since then, with its decades-old, unaffordable and unsustainable (in the opinion of this author) &amp;quot;Apollo on Steroids&amp;quot; approach. ULA&amp;#039;s plan is to develop propellant depots, lunar injection stages, and lunar landers derived from the existing Delta IV and Atlas V launchers, and to launch all the pieces with those vehicles (or perhaps slightly larger versions of them). The proposed lunar lander has dual-axis thrusters, allowing it to use main propulsion vertically for most of the descent, and then rotate for a horizontal landing. This puts the astronauts much closer to the lunar surface for safer entry and exits. The depots are placed in low Earth orbit and in the Earth-moon Lagrange point L2. ULA claims that their plan will provide a robust launch architecture, with two human-rated vehicles (rather than depending on one, as NASA has with the shuttle, and with its plans for Ares I), and that it can shorten the gap between the planned end of shuttle operations next year and the operational capability of some kind of replacement, during which NASA will have to rely on the Russians for rides to and from the ISS. Some of the papers put to rest the myths about reliability and aborts that Ares proponents have been using to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the existing vehicles. Also, while ULA has developed an architecture with their own system, they point out that other launchers, both commercial and international, can complement it, particularly for propellant launches. This would satisfy some of the requirements of the Aldridge Commission from five years ago in a way that NASA&amp;#039;s current Constellation plans never have.  L2 Depot with Orion and Altair docked (left) and departing Ascender vehicle. These ideas, from &amp;quot;A Commercially Based Lunar Architecture,&amp;quot; one of the ULA papers, would have been heretical a few months ago: &amp;quot;The use of smaller, commercial launchers coupled with orbital depots eliminates the need for a large launch vehicle. Much is made of the need for more launches. This is perceived as a detriment. However since 75 percent of all the mass lifted to low Earth orbit is merely propellant with no intrinsic value it represents the optimal cargo for low-cost, strictly commercial launch operations. &amp;quot;These commercial launch vehicles, lifting a simple payload to a repeatable location, can be operated on regular, predictable schedules. Relieved of the burden of hauling propellants, the mass of the Altair and Orion vehicles for a lunar mission is very small and can also be easily carried on existing launch vehicles. This strategy leads to high infrastructure utilization, economic production rates, high demonstrated reliability and the lowest possible costs. &amp;quot;This architecture encourages the exploration of the moon to be conducted not in single, disconnected missions, but in a continuous process which builds orbital and surface resources year by year. The architecture and vehicles themselves are directly applicable to Near Earth Object and Mars exploration and the establishment of a functioning depot at Earth-moon L2 provides a gateway for future high-mass spacecraft venturing to the rest of the solar system.&amp;quot; Emphasis mine. These papers may well mark the final nails in the Ares and Constellation coffin, signaling that this fall could see yesterday&amp;#039;s heresy become tomorrow&amp;#039;s new conventional wisdom. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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