From the Archive: The Right Decision

No, I absolutely do not feel that developing Ares II was the wrong decision. Ares II was exactly the right decision. That vehicle did everything we needed it to do, and we accomplished it without needing to develop any new technology, without any miracles. It was perfectly suited to meet the needs of our program at the time, and we designed it that way intentionally. You can trace that line of thinking all the way back to the recommendations of the Augustine commission. Coming out of 2008, 2009, with the recession, the cost overruns in the Ares V program—we needed to refine our scope, and that’s what we did. And we did it well.

I don’t think commercial enterprise was ready at that time. The commercial successes we had in the 2010s—you look at Antares and Falcon 9—we saw that companies could develop these complex systems with heavy oversight. But the industry was not mature at that time. We needed to take the time to cultivate that private sector and let it develop into what it is now. And now they have that talent, and they can develop new technologies such as reuse of space assets that allow us to really leverage their experience. That capability now is what allowed us to ultimately retire Ares II, and to fully focus our efforts on the kinds of exploration systems that NASA does best. But it needed time.

-Major General Charles F. Bolden, Jr.