I'm Several Days Faster Than The New York Times

I swear when I wrote this I hadn't read this.

It's good to see NASA is finally admitting reality. Ever since the Shuttle program was gutted in the Nixon Administration, NASA should have bit the bullet and re-designed the Shuttle. As you can see by the NYT article, most of the parts of the Shuttle can still be used, but by reorganizing the parts you get a much more sensible design. People have talked for years about building a "Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicle" (SDLV is an acronym you might see a lot) and it's a good idea for a number of reasons, and a bad reason for a few. It's a good reason for the simple fact that the Shuttle's parts are already availble, and they've got lots of data on their performance. You could argue that it's a bad idea to throw out all these parts when it will be more expensive to start all over again. Indeed, the original critics of the Shuttle program made exactly that argument - the Saturn V and it's predecessors were well-tested designs that, with some small tweaking, could be made at lower costs to the taxpayer because they already existed, whereas nobody then knew when the Shuttle would be ready.

However, there's also an argument to be made that equivalent or better performance could be had for lower cost by using newer, equally-tested parts. For example, rather than using the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) which were designed in the 1970s, or using the old J-2 rockets from the Apollo, a number of people have advocated using the Boeing RS-83. I'm not well-versed enough to say if there's an objectively better rocket engine, but it's worth noting that while NASA talks about a steady evolution from the Shuttle, a number of companies are proposing more revolutionary changes.

And one added note - ATK Thiokol, the company that is apparently most emphatic about the models used in the NYT piece (they've put together a website called Safe, Simple, and Soon to back this plan), is also the company which makes the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) for the Shuttle. That's my main reservation about this whole plan, in that the manned space capsule would be launched aboard a modified SRB. The SRBs are, it should be said, incredibly polluting, somewhat dangerous, and were incidentally the piece of equipment which destroyed the Challenger. They have been on the list of Shuttle parts most needing to be replaced or at least redesigned for decades now. You could get better performance out of a liquid-fueled rocket. Of course, ATK Thiokol is incredibly disingenuous in their website when they say SRB's can't "explode". Of course they can, like any rocket. While I like the overall shape of this plan, if keeping the SRBs is part of it, it's liable to get more astronauts killed.