Reading a few Space blogs is one way to ruin your day and cause you to instinctively reach for the Pepcid Complete. If it isn’t the usual pejorative stuff from one site, and its erudite commenters, then it might be others and their somewhat less than supportive coverage of Ares I.
For those anti-Ares I Space people, life must be getting tough. First, the DM-1 test of the 5-segment Shuttle derived solid rocket motor went smoothly, literally, with much less vibration than predicted–8-10 times less. Then the Ares I-X launch was much quieter than the models predicted while none of the other dire predictions by some appeared. Every day that Ares I continues means that this program can make its case that it is the optimal choice.
I’m not sure when the Space advocacy community decided that NASA can do no right. Partly, I guess it’s because many Space activists wanted to work for NASA but couldn’t, wanted to become engineers but didn’t, wanted to go into Space but can’t. Some just hate NASA for other reasons. And then there are those who for whatever illogical reasons believe that but for NASA’s inefficiencies we would be back on the Moon, visiting Mars, rather than circling the Earth every 90 minutes. In any case, NASA’s critics cannot dispute that they have been wrong in their dire predictions about the J-2X, Ares I vibration issues, among their many other concerns. Which only goes to show that the NASA folks do indeed know what they are doing, Mike Griffin was right, and others were wrong.