Random Thought: EDS

Just wanted to post a few random thoughts while I watch the kids until Tiff has had a chance to get some sleep (James was up sick all night).

First one regards the EDS. I haven't thought out all the implications of this idea, but wanted to open it up for discussion. It appears that NASA may be setting itself up big-time for failure by focusing so much of its scarce near-term money and its short window of opportunity on new launch vehicles and earth-to-orbit capsules. This seems particularly short-sighted when you consider that:

1. It is impossible for Ares-1/Orion to close the US manned spaceflight "gap", while it is reasonably possible that commercial enterprise could.
2. When you factor in budget uncertainties, technical uncertainties, delays, etc, commercial manned vehicles are more likely to fly first than Ares I/Orion.
3. The law you know, kinda requires NASA to purchase commercial services whenever possible instead of owning and operating their own systems. Not that they've ever let the law get in the way of a good time, but I'm just sayin.
4. When it comes to launching to ISS, many of the commercial projects underway offer more crew or cargo capacity at substantially reduced costs.

A lot of people will come back with arguments about how the CEV has capabilities for long-duration space operations that won't exist in these commercial manned vehicles. While this is kinda true, the reality is overblown. If you've looked at pictures of the interior layout of the CEV, it is still a very cramped place. It doesn't as far as I've heard have a toilet (adding yet more evidence that Apollo on Steroids is turning into Apollo on Geritol--Now with Depends!), and only has a small "galley".

It will have a thicker heat shield, but seriously guys, thickening up a heat shield isn't that tough. Especially with 40 years of continual experience in the art, including work done on designing heat shields for entering Jupiter's atmosphere, or Titan's, or nuclear reentry vehicles, etc. The fact is that designing a heat shield tough enough for lunar return is really not that much tougher than designing one for earth return. It's thicker, but we have a lot more experience base now to base design work on, and it's probably now entirely within the capabilities of commercial entities to design a "lunar/martian return shield" upgrade for their capsules at a reasonable price.

Even more to the point, this whole mixing of earth-to-orbit transportation with cramped "long-term" habitation capabilities is one of the major technical flaws of the Shuttle. Here you have a huge service module that gets used up after every mission, and you end up sizing the reentry shield, parachutes, etc for a capsule that is significantly bigger than it needs to be to transport the crew.

So here's my crazy idea (that I know would never happen). What if you offloaded from the CEV to the EDS all of the subsystems that were necessary for long-term spaceflight, and then outright cancel the CEV and just buy crew/cargo flights from commercial providers? Have a manned version of the EDS include something like Sundancer--a fairly lightweight module that would provide spacious accommodations for several astronauts for up to several month periods (including some sort of toilet), while the unmanned version could haul cargo. Size the EDS to perform the LOI and TEI burns. Maybe even go out on a limb and design the thing for orbital refueling and dry launch.

If you did it that way, you'd have a true "exploration vehicle". One that could support lunar or martian exploration, and that wouldn't be duplicating and competing with existing or nearterm commercial capabilities. Not to mention it would be more capable and could help catalyze commercial development.

Reality is that NASA isn't going to do this, but it does suggest a route commercial entities could take for manned exo-LEO transportation.