<p style="margin-bottom:0in">ATTACHMENT J-1 : "NASA is responsible for ... the design of the Ares V vehicle and elements.." That pretty much says it all.</p><p style="margin-bottom:0in"> What is the objective of NASA, as a government agency supported by taxpayer dollars? NASA's original role as NACA was purely to do technology development, to allow the US aviation industry to lead the world and thus provde benefits to Americans in economic growh and in cost, safety and speed of air travel. Industry was the customer, not the vendor. What constitutes "exploration"? New scientific knowledge? Or do people have to be there? Astronomical resarch obviously can't be conducted in person. </p><p style="margin-bottom:0in">The work could be in-hose of contracted out, whichever was more practical; generally laboratories were in-house but design and manufacturing of experimental aircraft and rockets was contracted out. A well-run organization will contract out those items that can be bought more cheaply than they can be built in-house. While NASA desings many aspects of Constellation in-house, it contracts out the very things private indsty would keep in-house, i.e. planning and management, R&D, and unique operations that are performed by "support contractors" and have to be re-learned every time a new contractor takes over, while the rebid usually goes to whatever comapny can exaggerate most convincingly about how few employees can do the job.</p><p style="margin-bottom:0in">The critical problem today is not so much that NASA is doing in-house design, as that, as Mike Griffin himself said, NASA cannot spend money on technology development because they have to spend it on the Constellation program. The COTS program looks promising but most other real R&D is gone; the development of reusable launch vehicles has been cancelled, the attempts to create new technology without funding through knock-offs of the X-prize seemed naive, and aeronautics is still moribund, at least within NASA. Cooperation with industry has not been a priority even when it would have cost nothing; when Rutan offered to fly the X-34 prototypes at his own expense. NASA refused and they have been gathering dust since. Had an ELV been selected for Constellation it would at least have been supporting a system with potential commercial viability; the Ares I is too expensive to serve any comercial role. </p><p style="margin-bottom:0in">I'm not familiar with the process in the planetary science side, but it seems a little more reasonable; NASA establishes the basic mission, a contractor designs the spacecraft and researchers propose instruments they will design and build, so the developers have quite a bit of flexibility. </p><p style="margin-bottom:0in"> </p>