NASA's "Highway to Space" is anything but

Rand Simberg has a great article on Pajamas Media that discusses how woefully inadequate the new Ares 1 and Ares 5 launch vehicles will be in terms of truly opening up the Space Frontier. I wonder if these things will ever really fly. I've read previously of how the Ares 1 has a bad "pogo" or vibration problem that would make it inappropriate for launching manned vehicles (which is its primary purpose). Simberg also notes that the Ares 5 has grown in weight so that it would be too heavy for the current Saturn 5 / Space Shuttle crawler. Yeesh!

What is I think really good about Simberg's article is that he really skewers the overblown rhetoric of Mike Griffin who was describing these launch vehicles as the 21st century space equivalent of our interstate highway system. As Simberg points out, "this analogy might make sense if the Interstate Highway System (IHS) were capable of handling only one four-passenger car at a time (with the passengers only employees of the government) a few times a year at a cost of billions of dollars per cross-country trip, and the cars had to be destroyed upon return". So sad, but so true.