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DIRECT 3.0's Jupiter launcher
Can someone provide an objective view of the DIRECT 3.0 Jupiter launcher proposal? Background is here:http://www.directlauncher.com/It's interesting to r. There seems to be a grassroots movement in the amateur community to promote this project as a replacement for Constellation. However, all I can find on it comes from their supporters. So of course it talks about how much of a no-brainer this is. But my skeptic sensors are on red alert because I can't find any independent or objective coverage of it. And I'm not qualified enough to judge their engineering approaches. So can anyone tell me why such a system doesn't fit NASA's vision or point to an objective discussion of it?
Hmm... so the design would resuse the Space Shuttle main engines? I remember reading Richard P. Feynman's vivid memories about his participation in the investigation of the first Space Shuttle Desaster. One episode is about him (Feynman) inviting managers and engineers to sit at the same table and write, independently, on a piece of paper what they think the odds are that a space shuttle main engine would fail catastrophically. The estimates of the engineers were shockingly high (= high risk), while the estimate of the manager was shockingly out-of-sync with his engineers' risk assesment: it was far more optimistic. In his famous appendix to the final report http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html Feynman concluded that whileadmittingly the main engines had no role in the accident, it was obvious that the same management and engineering problems that eventually let to the catastrophic solid rocket booster failure were also present in the design phase and later phases of the main engine development. I guess it was for some reason that the designers of the Constellation program decided to look back to the Saturn/Apollo days for blueprints of a liquid fuel engines to start with, instead of using the Shuttle's main engine as a basis. CS Heinz
Two days after the post, here is a semi-response from NASA. They asked an engineer to present a similar proposal, they are calling the Shuttle-Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle.Info here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/MN2218GD18.D...