SCIENCE - American Ingenuity = Affordable Space Program

"Canceled NASA Rocket Could Return as Part of Low-Cost Space Taxi" by KENNETH CHANG, New York Times 2/8/2011

Excerpt

Take a canceled, over-budget NASA rocket, stack a workhorse European satellite launcher on top of it, and the result could be a powerful, low-cost alternative for taking people to space.

That is the plan of Alliant Techsystems of Minneapolis — the aerospace company more commonly known as ATK, which manufacturers the solid rocket motors for NASA’s space shuttles — and Astrium, a European company that builds Ariane 5 rockets, which are used to launch satellites. The two will announce on Tuesday what is essentially a commercial version of the Ares I, the expensive NASA rocket that Congress and the Obama administration canceled last year.

The Ares I, part of a bloated NASA program to send astronauts back to the moon, could become a success story in the Obama administration’s effort to shape a more affordable space program with the help of the private sector. NASA’s so-called commercial crew program is seeking companies to build and operate space taxis to take astronauts to the International Space Station.

The new rocket, named Liberty, would be much cheaper than the Ares I, because the unfinished NASA-designed upper stage of the Ares I would be replaced with the first stage of the Ariane 5, which has been launched successfully 41 consecutive times. The lower stage of the Liberty, a longer version of the shuttle booster built by ATK, would be almost unchanged from the Ares I.