NASA’s Shadow Army of Engineers
It has reported by the media that there is a “shadow army” of NASA engineers who are designing an alternative to the future Ares rockets—in their spare time. The purpose of NASA designing the Ares I crew launcher is to launch a replacement by 2015 for the retiring shuttles in 2010. Originally the design was to be considered cheap and easy, reusing the space shuttle technology as much as possible. Unfortunately, NASA is saying this is not possible due to the relatively heavy crew capsule that must leave Earth’s atmosphere and gravity pull.
One fixable problem is the vibrations causing irregularities the way the solid rocket motor burns fuel, even though NASA does not consider to a problem. In a recent public report by NASA, it was suggested by NASA that they may not be able to meet its own internal goal of launching the rocket by 2013, possibly also missing its publically-stated goal of a 2015 launching.
With the overweight Orion possibly having a landing problem due to lack of performance from Ares I, engineers are working through many added solutions for the vehicle as it headed into the Preliminary Design Reviews (PRDs). A major solution by Stephen Metschan, president of TeamVision Corportation is the development of the website “NASASpaceFlight.com” where 57 anonymous NASA employees have been gathered to assist in designing an alternative. Metschan’s company designs the software that NASA uses to test its models, and which for years he has developed his own plan for how NASA should get to the moon. He does half the engineering while the others do the number crunching and trouble-shooting aspects of the design.
Part of the alternative planning is that Metschan feels strongly that the Ares rocket has strayed from its “original Congressional mandate, set in 2005, to recycle as much technology from the shuttle as possible to keep costs low, the space workforce employed, and the window between the shuttle’s retirement and the new vehicle as small as possible.” Called DIRECT, the new plan means emphasizing a direct transaction from the shuttle to a new system. With the plan using two identical “Jupiter” rockets carrying the lofting cargo only and the other carrying crew members, each Jupiter rocket would have a liquid fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
