Excellent article, Steidle sounds just like the sort of leader you'd want running the office of exploration.

Good first step to be looking but when are you going to be ready to actually do something other than look. It has been 1 yr plus and still no shuttle flights. It has now been 4 months since the presidential announcement. How long does one need to take in order to decide what to do.

Much longer than you may expect. The decision is much more complicated than just looking over a dozen or so proposals like picking out a car color and saying "I like this one, lets spend a few billion on it".

When compared to the past 20 years or so the current process is amazingly fast.

As far as the shuttle's down time, I think it is just an indication of just how bad of shape it has been in. We've been incredibly lucky that there have been only two vehicles lost.

It is not that hard, when you base the designs from current available rockets, engine to fuel effiecency use, fuel type tanks and oxidizer, payload lift requirement, how many sections needed to minimize the weight from top to the bottom, and lets not forget radiation shielding weight, lunar lander, crew habitat module or the many other necessary items to do the job, food water ect....

Each of these items have been done many times before in much shorter amounts of time.

Like the article said not every thing is needed at once but has to be part of the plan that is put into motion for it to happen on time.

"Each of these items have been done many times before in much shorter amounts of time."

In less than four months??? I don't know when that ever happened.

I think the plan is moving at an excellent pace for planning. And that is about all they can do until Congress allocates money for more than "planning".

You are right not in 4 months but then again not in the estimated 10 for 2018 manned flights either. Way to slow....
The soviet program is still going strong because it leverages from where it is, not from designing from fresh each time.

I agree Harold, NASA has a habit of re-inveting the wheel all the time.

If congress would approve enough money we could; return the shuttle to flight, use it until 2013 completing ISS and at the same time get the CEV ready for a first flight much earlier than currently planned. But do you think congress would approve such a fast track? I don't. It is more a congress/political will problem than it is a NASA problem.

And speaking of funding or of paying bills straight from the Nasawatch site:

27 May 2026: Russians to submit bill for spacewalk, MSNBC

"The "acceptable" payment would be 500 hours of crew work time - that is, time during which one country's crew member performs tasks for the other country's programs. This would involve no cash transfer, and in fact NASA is forbidden by law to pay Russia for any space-related services. But the value of the time request could amount to as much as $10 million, by one expert's informal measure."

Editor's note: Gee, the Russians sure learned all the tricks of capitalism from us really fast, didn't they? Wait until your business partner is stuck over a barrel - in a bad way - and then stick it to him. What is really annoying about this is the fact that throughout the 90s America subsidized the Russian space program either through more than a billion dollars in cash and several billion in shuttle flights to maintain and repair Mir - and a Shuttle joy ride for Valery Ryumin as well. Given this latest stick up, one certainly has to reconsider whether it is wise to deliberately rely upon them to fly Americans on Soyuz spacecraft after 2013 while we retire the shuttle and bring the CEV online.

Yeah, that's a crock. Maybe we should send the Russians a bill for all mission control PC's we gave them or for all those Mir support flights at 500 million each. Or ask for the Billion in cash we gave them during the late 1990's.

Bush and O'Keefe knew exactly what they were doing when they brought in Admiral Steidle to do this job. O'Keefe had worked pretty closely with him as Navy secretary and knew his abilities. The reality of the federal government is that the only department that has experience with integrating wide ranging and cutting-edge technologies and expensive programs, all to accomplish a single goal--in this case national defense--is the united states military, hence the heavy brass filtering in at the top of NASA of late.
It was exactly the right choice, and the military boys are also bringing their knowledge of how to play political ball without subverting the goal--a key component of keeping congressional support.