Failure to launch

I've blogged in the past about the huge problems NASA is having with the Ares program. It looks like an independent panel to the President has also drawn some fairly bleak conclusions about NASA's replacement for the Space Shuttle and the possibility of making back to the moon in the near future.

I can't believe that part of the Shuttle phase out/go back to the Moon proposal that Bush floated was to decommission the ISS by 2015...that's insane. The Russians kept Mir up there 15 years using duct tape and 30 year old "Progress" supply ships for fuck's sake.

The quagmire that is the Ares program makes NASA look like a joke. How could they have gone so far in the day's of the Apollo program and now come up so short? Is NASA too safety minded now to engineer a vehicle system with enough compromises to actually work? Is their "acceptable risk" level to high to allow us to continue going into space? I doubt that ANY previous vehicle (Mercury/Apollo/Space Shuttle) would get built today because it would have not met the insane requirements that NASA is trying to meet.