That's cool! I appreciate your concerns about Constellation. There's a lot of bad press and unfortunate misinformation floating around, yet despite that it's extremely important to listen to the criticism.
Ares may be a polished turd, but it's the best turd ever built to date. It has the most thorough fault detection, caution and warning and abort systems of any human rated launch vehicle. First stage is reusable, just like Shuttle solid rocket motors. Hypergol and cryogenic handling is safer and more efficient than legacy systems. Block II first stages may even eliminate hydrazine completely in favor of electromechanial thrust vector control actuators. If first stage leaks, at a case or nozzle joint, the resulting side thrust can be easily countered until the end of first stage burn. Since it's not a side-mount, the escaping gas won't harm anything. We've got fault detection in both the forward and aft skirt in case of leaks on either end of the case.
1. "Black zones": In the event of an uncontained failure, the launch abort system can escape cleanly even near max Q. Ares has no "black zones", despite what the tinfoil crew may claim. Escaping from an uncontained failure is not just a requirement for solid boosters; liquid engines can blow up, too.
2. Thermal Protection Systems (TPS): Orion has sufficient thermal protection to make a worst case straight in ballistic re-entry at any point during ascent, and the capsule floats well enough and has enough life support on board to safely come down anywhere on the planet. The competing lightweight commercial capsules, launched on EELV's, do not have TPS scaled for re-entry from a lunar mission, and it's unknown if they'd even survive the heat of a ballstic North Atlantic re-entry.
3. Failsafe insertion: Ares inserts Orion in an elliptical orbit with a negative perigee altitude. If something goes horribly wrong on Orion, they come down safely in half a rev. Contrast this with the CCTS approach, naively copied from commercial satellite launching - they put their capsule (and upper stage) into a long lifetime circular orbit. If the capsule has a failure, they're stuck up there. Depending on which version you look at, the commercial crew aren't even wearing launch and entry suits.
Ares I is the safest rocket ever built. I'm proud to be a part of it. Regardless what goes on at the executive level, Constellation remains the Program of Record and it will literally take an act of Congress to kill it. Until then, Obama's proposed budget is just that: proposed.