NASA Engineers Work On Alternative Moon Rocket

Gibson writes "A team of 57 engineers at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight center feel that the Ares rocket is not the best solution for launching the new CEV. They are currently working on their own time developing an alternative launch system known as Jupiter. The 131 page proposal, along with other information, is available on the project website. Proponents of the project say that it is 'simpler, safer, and sooner' than the Ares project, predicting the ability for a return to the moon in 2017, two years before the current goal. Ares management has so far dismissed the proposal as a 'napkin drawing.'"

Comments

Never underestimate a motivated engineer

[schwit1]

A handful of engineers and a stenographer cooped up in a hotel room over a weekend, designed and developed the B52. And its still going strong 50 years later.

After all, it not rocket surgery.

Re:Engineers vs management

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no, actually that's exactly what happened. Griffin and Horowitz (the PHB's) came up with their Ares plan many years ago, did a 60 day "study" that came back with the recommendation to follow their plan, and ordered the MSFC engineers to build their designs, rather than the engineers' long standing plans to develop more conventional and cost-effective derivatives of the Shuttle (NLS/Magnum) or EELV.

Back in the '60s, the NASA PHB's were at least smart enough to see that John Houbolt had come up with a solution to fix their performance gap. Today, the PHB's are too busy doing political spin to promote their preferred solution and hide the 7mT performance shortfall, the 6 year spaceflight gap, and the $1.4 billion to $2 billion per launch total cost.

Thats one heckuva' job Mikey.

Re:Simple, as in "leverages existing systems"

[prisoner-of-enigma]

in the space business, proven designs count for a LOT in risk mitigation.

Very true, which is why the Shuttle continues to fly with 1970's-era technology controlling most of it.

However, I would posit the following: the Shuttle program dumped most of Apollo in the trash bin and started with something new. I'm of the opinion that what we ended up with was not an improvement over Apollo. The Shuttle is more expensive, more finicky, less reliable, and arguably much more dangerous than Apollo ever was. So, while we have a large body of knowledge centered around Shuttle systems, the systems themselves may not be worth prolonging through to Ares. Hence the justification for breaking with the (Shuttle) past with Ares.

The Shuttle was a great experiment, but ultimately we learned it was something we shouldn't have built. Everything it's done in the last quarter century could've been done better, faster, and cheaper with Apollo-era tech (with incremental improvements as you alluded to earlier) just as the Russians have proven with their launch systems.

No human has been out of low Earth orbit in roughly thirty years. The last three that did, did so on top of a Saturn V. The Shuttle has had us going in circles (literally) since then. The ISS prolongs that boondoggle. Why do we need an ISS? To give the Shuttle some place to go! Why do we need a Shuttle? To build the ISS! What fantastic circular logic. What a horrific waste.