Direct 2.0 space transportation system

http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/index.htm


Comments? Is there a point? Will anybody who can even SEE NASA's
purse strings even see it or understand it?

sferrin wrote:

http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/index.htm


Comments? Is there a point? Will anybody who can even SEE NASA's
purse strings even see it or understand it?

Another imaginary rocket for an imaginary moon program.

Real rockets : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V_rocket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_rocket

sferrin wrote:
http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/index.htm


Comments? Is there a point? Will anybody who can even SEE NASA's
purse strings even see it or understand it?


I'm sure everyone down at NASA knows about it, and I'm also sure that
those in the know might look at what happened to the Soviet Moon program
when they were funding the N-1 and UR-700 simultaneously.
There comes a point in a program where you have to make a choice and
devote your efforts to it if you want to accomplish anything.
We could have built the Saturn V and Nova simultaneously, but we decided
to devote our efforts to the Saturn V due to funding constraints.
In the same way, we could have been working on Project Apollo and the
Gemini-derived lunar landers simultaneously, but devoted all our efforts
to Apollo - and told McDonnell to shut the hell up and go away.
Ares V is hanging by a thread anyway (I'd give the whole lunar return
mission plan around a 20% chance of ever getting done at best, and even
Ares 1 looks pretty iffy). The time to have put this concept forward was
several years ago when the ball first got rolling, not now.
Is it a better alternative to Ares 1/5?
Yes, it might well be.
But as Voltaire said: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
Right now it's a distraction to a program that is already having enough
problems without changing horses in the middle of the stream.
Because if you suddenly switch to this design...then a couple of years
from now, someone will propose a launch vehicle that looks better than
the Jupiter launcher on paper...and then Jupiter will get dropped in
favor of _it_.
Then another "better" concept will come along....
And just like Space Station Freedom, all the money will get eaten up in
redesigns without producing any flight hardware.
And the past twenty years of NASA are rife with billions of dollars
spent on canceled manned spaceflight related programs that produced no
flight hardware...which I'm sure the aerospace industry just loves....
they get millions upon millions of dollars for writing wordy reports and
making pretty pictures of things that never have to be built; so any
claims for them can't be disproved.*
Congress has seen that bait-and-switch NASA approach once too often
already, without Griffin having to go to them and explain that the great
new space program NASA's been pushing for years is a pile of crap, but
this _new_ design is just wonderful.
If anything at all is going to come of Ares, they had better stick to
the original concept rather than wandering all over the place.

* Ideally they would build a gigantic asteroid defense system - assuming
that a giant killer asteroid really was heading for Earth, the odds are
it would be hundreds of years from now, so the designer will all be
safely dead of old age. If the asteroid defense system works, then the
builders are heroes - if it doesn't, then there is no one left to sue
them. :-)

Pat

"sferrin" wrote in message
...


http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/index.htm


Comments? Is there a point? Will anybody who can even SEE NASA's
purse strings even see it or understand it?

Yes. From what I understand some progress is being made on this front. A
lot of discussion can be found in the NASA Spaceflight.com discussion groups
(the Direct group).

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
I'm sure everyone down at NASA knows about it, and I'm also sure that
those in the know might look at what happened to the Soviet Moon program
when they were funding the N-1 and UR-700 simultaneously.
There comes a point in a program where you have to make a choice and
devote your efforts to it if you want to accomplish anything.

If Ares I and Ares V succeed, I'm sure Griffin is expecting to be remembered
as some sort of new Wernher von Braun. Unfortunately for Griffin, he's had
to drop the high ISP SSME's from the designs which have horribly warped the
Ares I and V designs. von Braun also had the venerable F-1 engine to work
with while Griffin is saddled with using shuttle derived SRB's. :-(

We could have built the Saturn V and Nova simultaneously, but we decided
to devote our efforts to the Saturn V due to funding constraints.

Not quite the same thing. The N-1 and UR-700 were completely different
projects by completely different organizations. von Braun's team would have
done both Saturn V and Nova so you get some economies of scale there.
Actually, what Griffin is doing with Ares I and Ares V is similar to doing
Saturn V and Nova at the same time.

That's one of the DIRECT teams arguments for Jupiter. Both the Jupiter 120
and the Jupiter 232 use the same SRB's as the shuttle and both use the very
same core stage design. The only difference in the core stage is that the
120 lacks one RS-68 engine. The Jupiter 120 is not optimized for the
lighter payload.

The Jupiter 232 is the same vehicle as the 120, only with an extra RS-68
engine on the first stage and with an upper stage (what NASA is calling the
EDS). This commonality with shuttle hardware and commonality between the
two versions of the launch vehicle mean less development costs and lower
fixed and reoccurring costs than Ares I/V which are two very different
vehicles.

With DIRECT, a lunar mission takes two launches of the Jupiter 232. With
Ares, you need one Ares I launch and one Ares V launch.

In the same way, we could have been working on Project Apollo and the
Gemini-derived lunar landers simultaneously, but devoted all our efforts
to Apollo - and told McDonnell to shut the hell up and go away.

Sort of. Gemini and Apollo *were* funded simultaneously. It was a horribly
expensive way to transition from project Mercury to project Apollo, but it
was done in the interest of *time* in order to beat the Russians to the
moon. If the moon race wasn't in full swing, Gemini might have been skipped
entirely. The Apollo CSM was seen as a multi-purpose vehicle from the
start, so Gemini wouldn't be needed.

Ares V is hanging by a thread anyway (I'd give the whole lunar return
mission plan around a 20% chance of ever getting done at best, and even
Ares 1 looks pretty iffy). The time to have put this concept forward was
several years ago when the ball first got rolling, not now.
Is it a better alternative to Ares 1/5?
Yes, it might well be.
But as Voltaire said: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The DIRECT supporters see Ares I and V as "the perfect" and Jupiter as "the
good". The intent is that Ares I and Ares V are each optimized for the job
they do. This means that there is little to no commonality betwen them,
their ground handling equipment, their mobile launch pads, and etc.

DIRECT supporters argue that Jupiter 120 and Jupiter 232 are two flavors of
*the same* launch vehicle. This is seen by them as similar to the three
stage Saturn V's used for lunar missions when compared to the two stage
Saturn V used to launch Skylab. Skylab would never have been launched if
NASA had to develop "the perfect" launch vehicle for it. A leftover Saturn
V, minus its third stage, was "the good".

Right now it's a distraction to a program that is already having enough
problems without changing horses in the middle of the stream.
Because if you suddenly switch to this design...then a couple of years
from now, someone will propose a launch vehicle that looks better than the
Jupiter launcher on paper...and then Jupiter will get dropped in favor of
_it_.

Some thought ISS would die when Clinton ordered the Russians on board to
"reduce costs". It's arguable whether costs were reduced or not, but the US
still dropped a lot of hardware which the Russians now provide (HAB,
propulsion module, and the assured crew return vehicle). DIRECT produces
less hardware than Ares, but gets the job done. DIRECT uses the SRB's as
is, produces one new liquid fueled first stage, and an EDS like upper stage.
That's two new stages to develop.

Ares I requires a new 5 segment SRB and a new J-2X upper stage. Ares V
looks like it will require a 6 segment SRB (maybe six segments), a new RS-68
powered first stage, and a new J-2X upper stage (the EDS). That's a total
of five new stages to develop! If we're generous and consider the 5 segment
SRB and 5.5 segment SRB to be "the same" then that's still four new stages
to develop, which is twice the number of DIRECT stages.

To fly a lunar mission, here's how they compa

Ares I (on its MLP)
1 - five segment SRB
1 - one J-2X powered upper stage
Ares V (on a different design of MLP)
2 - 5.5 or 6 segment SRB's
1 - 6 RS-68 powered lower stage (larger diameter than the ET)
1 - one J-2X powered EDS

Direct (two identical MLP's)
4 - four segment SRB's
2 - three RS-68 powered lower stage (same diameter as the ET)
1 - two J-2X powered EDS

So comparing Ares I/V versus two Jupiter 232 launches, they have similar
numbers of SRB segments (16 or 17 for Ares and 16 for DIRECT). They have
the same number of RS-68 engines (6). The only big difference is that
DIRECT uses four J-2X engines where Ares I/V uses two.

So which is "perfect" and which is "good"? Two launches of two completely
different vehicles or two launches of identical vehicles?

Also note that Jupiter 120 can fly ISS missions with both an Orion and a
shuttle class payload underneath. This is something that Ares I simply
cannot do, even if you ignore the problems with Ares I.

Then another "better" concept will come along....
And just like Space Station Freedom, all the money will get eaten up in
redesigns without producing any flight hardware.

Space station kept being redesigned because NASA kept spending all of the
development money without flying any hardware. Ares I and Ares V is in
danger of the same thing happening. When the $#^! hits the fan and Congress
says where's our rockets after all these billions spent, what will NASA say?

And the past twenty years of NASA are rife with billions of dollars spent
on canceled manned spaceflight related programs that produced no flight
hardware...which I'm sure the aerospace industry just loves....

True, but in the past they've *always* had shuttle for a fall-back. No
space station? No problem, fly Spacelab, LDEF, and a host of other
make-shift payloads. Their fall-back is going away and now they're working
without a net. Failure now means no NASA provided manned spaceflight after
2010.

they get millions upon millions of dollars for writing wordy reports and
making pretty pictures of things that never have to be built; so any
claims for them can't be disproved.*
Congress has seen that bait-and-switch NASA approach once too often
already, without Griffin having to go to them and explain that the great
new space program NASA's been pushing for years is a pile of crap, but
this _new_ design is just wonderful.

That's what's happening with Ares! Ares I and Ares V have real problems
caused by dropping the air started SSME. The RS-68 and the J-2X are just
not a one to one replacement in terms of performance.

If anything at all is going to come of Ares, they had better stick to the
original concept rather than wandering all over the place.

You don't have to call the rockets Jupiter 120 and Jupiter 232. Call them
Ares II and Ares III (or Ares IV). Tell Congress they've always been
fall-backs and that they'll be cheaper to develop since they use the *same*
SRB's as the shuttle and the *same* diameter first stage tankage as the ET.
Tell them they'll use the *same* ground infrastructure as the shuttle, with
some mods (pads, MLP's, VAB work platforms, and etc.). Tell them Ares
II/III is cheaper and quicker to develop than Ares I/V.

* Ideally they would build a gigantic asteroid defense system - assuming
that a giant killer asteroid really was heading for Earth, the odds are it
would be hundreds of years from now, so the designer will all be safely
dead of old age. If the asteroid defense system works, then the builders
are heroes - if it doesn't, then there is no one left to sue them. :-)

Good thing you put a smiley in there. :-)

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein