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Does anyone know what NASA's plans are 5-10 years down the road in terms of manned spaceflight? I know the shuttle program is nearing its end, but I haven't heard about anything replacing it.

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NASA Tuesday authorized two eight-month contracts, one to Lockheed Martin and the other to the team of Northrop Grumman and Boeing, to support a July 2006 review of the engineering systems for the agency's new Crew Exploration Vehicle. Each contract is worth approximately $28 million.

During this contract period, in addition to performing sustained engineering in support of the CEV review, the contractors will continue to develop designs for NASA's next-generation vehicle for human spaceflight and demonstrate ability to manage cost, schedule and risk.

Results of NASA's Exploration Systems Architectural Study, which defines parameters for the new vehicle to replace the space shuttle, will be incorporated into a "call for improvements" to be released later this year, inviting proposals from the selected contractors. These proposals will be evaluated for the final selection of a single CEV contractor.

Originally, the selection of a single industry team was planned for 2008, but to reduce or eliminate the time between the shuttle's retirement in 2010 and the first CEV flight, the selection is now planned for early 2006.

The CEV is expected to carry up to six astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit soon after the shuttle's retirement, and then on to the moon as early as 2015. The CEV is a key element of the United States' Vision for Space Exploration, which returns human explorers to the moon, Mars and beyond.

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It seems that the last line of that excerpt was tacked on so that their funding would not be reallocated after W decided he wanted us to go to Mars.

Exactly. The currently planned CEV is little more than soupped up Apollo (BTW, not only parts, but tooling for Saturn V have been destroyed; I am not sure for blueprints). There were some noises that CEV could end up as a lifting body after all (and, hopefully, hence test with Rutan's White Knight dropping X-37; I am not holding my breath, though, because X-37 is now DARPA's project, not NASA's).

In the meantime, NASA cancelled X-38 CRV 'ISS lifeboat' just when it passed high altitude drop tests and was ready for re-entry from the orbit test. It could have relatively easily been upgraded to 'ISS Crew Transportation Vehicle' (leaving heavy lifting to unmanned missions). They gave up on 'VentureStar' SSTO because of hydrogen tank problems. Those problems have been solved in the meantime, but nobody talks about SSTO (or anything meaningfully reusable) any more. Some two decades ago there was a grandiose NASP SSTO project that consumed prety enormous funds, and was abandoned. Now, when aerospike 'conventional' engines, as well as hypersonic SCRAM ones have been successfully demonstrated, mentioning SSTO is a recipe for being kicked out of NASA planning bodies.

I am affraid that Dubya's new 'vision' of return to the Moon and then Mars is just for show. I don't see anything like NASA in the wake of Kennedy's "We choose to go to the Moon!". It was focused, it had "can do" mentality. Some collosal blunders were done (like Apollo 1), but also spectacular successes (11 and, perhaps even more, 13). When today's NASA guys saw that fateful piece of foam hitting the wing leading edge, they firmly burried their heads into sand (e.g. first asking, but then quickly cancelling request that spy guys use telescopes on their birds to look into the state of the orbiter). Apollo era NASA would try to do something: in-orbit repair, launch another shuttle, ask Russians to launch a Progress or Soyuz with oxigen and water to buy some time, something. Perhaps those seven people would die anyway (they probably would), but they would have died fighting.

Sigh...

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The currently planned CEV is little more than soupped up Apollo

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When today's NASA guys saw that fateful piece of foam hitting the wing leading edge, they firmly burried their heads into sand (e.g. first asking, but then quickly cancelling request that spy guys use telescopes on their birds to look into the state of the orbiter).

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Apollo era NASA would try to do something: in-orbit repair, launch another shuttle, ask Russians to launch a Progress or Soyuz with oxigen and water to buy some time, something. Perhaps those seven people would die anyway (they probably would), but they would have died fighting.

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Your account of what happened is woefully inadequate. The people who 'saw' the foam hit the orbiter did everything they could to get the damage inspected. It was the management that was the roadblock. Grouping everybody that was involved under the 'NASA guys' label is an unfair characterization of people that did their damnest to bring their collegues and friends back home safely.

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The major difference is political attitudes and budget. Apollo era didn't have nearly the pressure (from a budget standpoint) that they do today. That was one of the reasons the requests were denied. In retrospect, I'm sure every manager involved wishes they could redo what happened. The problem was, the data available and past experience did not conclusively point to a total vehicle loss. The management made a decision (a very wrong one) that they were forced to based on those boundary conditions.

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How much loss of vehicle and two years of fleet grounding cost compared to fixing an obvious problem? And now, they are overcautious over every detail, but the problem that brought Columbia down is still there...

What is obvious now was not obvious in the past. They knew something wasn't right, but the consequences weren't known. So they took steps to minimize them, and eventually it bit them. Its easy to say something is obvious after a 28 month investigation leading to a 248 page report (for volume one - volumes two through six add on to it).

As for the problem still existing, the plant (Michoud Assembly Facility) that is responsible for the foam, is in the process of getting it's ass kicked. There was an article about how pissed NASA is at them a few days ago, but I can't find the link. I did find a CNN article that alludes to it, though.

Edit: Misspelled a word
- Tim