If they decide designing a new transport mean, perhaps they could use a waterway. I guess grabbing a water channel and transport vessel may be cheaper, faster, and simpler than building the mamoth road and the crawler. Besides it it would be easily upgradable, and offering gentler, vibration free, and likely faster transport than using road or rails.

The Chinese and Russians are making us look like complete fools. The figures I've seen say that the Jupiter is 50% cheaper to launch than the Ares. If that's the case you could still launch humans and any additional cargo you might need on separate rockets and still break even. For LEO it's a no-brainer, and the same appears to apply for the Moon.

Continued expansion of manned space exploration depends on one thing – logistics. If we can't get a good handle on launch costs, all other considerations are moot. We need cheap and dependable, not gee-wizz. Ask Russia and China. If this continues they'll wave at us from the Moon and laugh in our faces!

The best solution would be to re-design the crawler to increase its surface area with the earth and decrease its own weight. However, I doubt there is time to design and build this, and the cost would probably be more than a road rebuild. Unique machinery isn't cheap.
Next would be to somehow modify the current crawler. However, I'm not an expert on it, so I'm not sure it is possible; then the added problem that modifying it will add weight so there is a ratio or saturation point to work with even if you increase contact area.

To increase the strength of the road, they need to increase the depth, amount of rock, gravel and limestone used, and perhaps add a few other things to increase flexibility and strength (spattered concrete columns etc).
FIrst you would have to dig up what is currently there, and probably add about 4-8 feet of depth. So you would have to dig two trenches, which are over 4 miles long, 15-20 feet wide and 8-12 feet deep. Then fill it up with whatever material you are using; all while dealing with weather.
Figure up the cubic meters needed, and call your favorite supplier to get the material cost. Not to mention the transportation/disposal of the old material (some may be reusable), transport and placement of new material, and costs of digging, packing, smoothing, expedited settling, surveying, equipment, fuel, energy and workers. Now you can see it will cost a great deal to simply re-rock.

Heh… would be a great question for the Presidential candidates, and any other politician running in November; to see if they would support increased funding for the program, and of course… if so, how would they suggest paying for it?

If it breaks they they would have had to build a new one anyway…

Common sence really.

You can either spend a million dollars researching a pen that works in space… or… use a pencil.

First of all it only might be a problem.

Secondly, it will be quite a few years before Ares flies, plenty of time to resurface a roadway.

Thirdly, why should a new road way cost billions?

If you want to mass produce something, do the orion, as all trips start in low earth orbit.
From there you can go to a space station or pickup a moon lander module, mars module, space lab module, or even make a giant workstation with clamshell doors to act as a satellite service module.

I thin in this case two rockets may add up to be cheaper than one. What I would wonder is if there are other pads that can support the ares… or if this is the biggest thing going?

If so, it might be a worthwhile upgrade for a nation that wants to put heavy things in orbit.

How infeasible is it to create a smaller craft using prefab parts and just fly more of them? If bigger is vastly more expensive and countries like Iran actually have legitimate space faring ambitions; why is the U.S. finding it so difficult? We actually have the resources *and* the experience these issues just make us seem inept.

What proof do you have that it will cost billions (of dollars, I guess you mean) to upgrade the crawlerway, if it's even necessary? There's no pricing estimates in your piece or the Flight International article. Prove or retract.

I'm not buying the idea that it costs billions of dollars to upgrade this road. Sounds more like a general upgrade of the launch facility thats going to incorporate more than just a gravel path.
Maybe they'd want to retire the crawler in favor of a rail system or something more able to deal with the weight.

Either way its an unavoidable problem if NASA wants to launch larger payloads.
Maybe our new found political friends will give up on shuttle flight extensions to pave the way for constellation.

*rimshot*

/I'll be here all week! Try the veal.