Since the early years of this century, NASA has been struggling to turn Shuttle-derived hardware into a heavy lift vehicle. It hasn't gone well. Underfunding, politically imposed design decisions and a lack of a clear purpose has resulted in a slow-motion disaster which looks bound to deliver a rocket that is obsolete on arrival.
With so much going wrong, it's easy to imagine how things might have gone better. I am curious how much better people can see it going though.
I would have thought the ideal would be a program based around the use of the Atlas V or Delta IV - the Atlas V had
some especially favourable upgrade paths if heavy lift was the goal. The Delta IV upgrade pathways
have their own advantages though. For example, using a US-sourced engine and (
according to this document) the Delta IVs were likely to be less expensive per kg of payload. And even the base Delta IV and Atlas V could have supported a program with a space station and using Orion capsules in orbit.
However, does anyone think there is a way to get a useful outcome out of a shuttle-derived program before 2018? Would following a pathway like DIRECT advocated really have been sufficiently better than the Ares program that Jupiter rockets would be flying useful payloads by the present? Were there other pathways that would produce useful outcomes?
fasquardon