Some years ago, Sweden had a plan to defend their air space with a vast network of radars at cellular phone network masts coupled with very fast missiles. And whaddya know, now Swedish missile oxidizer technology is finding itself to Ares I. I don’t know if it’s from the same missiles.
Ares I is becoming a parody of rocket development really. A parody of billions of dollars.
People might say of NASA that “it takes time to change a big ship’s direction”, hence people should tolerate Ares’ problems that keep popping up years after they’ve been known of elsewhere and trust that NASA will prevail eventually.
Hard to change direction quickly? Excuse me! It surely didn’t take long for Griffin to change the agency’s course totally in 2005. Fire everyone who disagrees (Steidle etc), put up a new quick study (ESAS) and put all efforts on the results (that are quickly shown to be not really cutting it, Ares I and V are becoming larger and larger and less and less shuttle derived every iteration).
I think we’re setting up for some major directional change…real soon.