DIRECT v2.0

[kraisee]

In Brief, DIRECT v2.0 is a proposal to replace the currently planned Ares-I and Ares-V launch vehicle plan with a lower-cost alternative based much more closely on the existing Space Shuttle (A.K.A. Space Transportation System - STS) hardware.

The intention is to reduce the time and cost to implement a new architecture capable of supporting the ISS, Return-to-the-Moon missions and eventually missions to Mars and Beyond as directed by the President and Congress.

Here is a YouTube video to introduce you to the basic concept:




This section will provide a forum for people to ask questions about the proposal. Technical, budgetary, schedule and political discussion is all welcome and all relevant in these turbulent times. Whether your experience is considerable or you're new to the space world any questions are most welcome and members of the DIRECT Team will be here to attempt to field them.

One section will be set aside to allow supporting documentation and another for discussion of DIRECT.


Ross B Tierney
www.directlauncher.com

[Spacenut]

Hi there Mr. Tierney!

I find your proposal quite interesting. I read trhough your website that you have on your sig, and have 2 questions to ask.
I hope you take the q's in the spirit that they are meant to be, which is pro-space.

First, why do the people that advocate this alternative, not trust Nasa's competency in building the new Ares vehicles? Is it because of just budget, or is it something else, or is it both?

Second question is why change the name of the launch vehicle family to Jupiter? Ares to me is just fine.


The best to you.

[Bob]

In Brief, DIRECT v2.0 is a proposal to replace the currently planned Ares-I and Ares-V launch vehicle plan with a lower-cost alternative based much more closely on the existing Space Shuttle (A.K.A. Space Transportation System - STS) hardware.

The intention is to reduce the time and cost to implement a new architecture capable of supporting the ISS, Return-to-the-Moon missions and eventually missions to Mars and Beyond as directed by the President and Congress.

Here is a YouTube video to introduce you to the basic concept:




This section will provide a forum for people to ask questions about the proposal. Technical, budgetary, schedule and political discussion is all welcome and all relevant in these turbulent times. Whether your experience is considerable or you're new to the space world any questions are most welcome and members of the DIRECT Team will be here to attempt to field them.

One section will be set aside to allow supporting documentation and another for discussion of DIRECT.


Ross B Tierney
www.directlauncher.com

I am curious how far a long the proposal is?

-Bob

[kraisee]

Spacenut,
Good questions, thanks for asking. There are a number of reasons for why we disagree with NASA's choices. This is going to be a *long* post, but I hope it'll be a useful one.

While Budget is certainly one of the reasons we disagree with NASA's current direction, it certainly isn't the whole story. But lets start with it anyway...

Budget:

The US has two existing launch vehicles in the ~20mT lift capability range today - the Atlas-V and the Delta-IV. Current estimates suggest that either of these (in "Heavy" 3-core configuration) could be human rated to lift an Orion spacecraft for a cost of about $1bn and would take somewhere in the region of about 3-4 years to do.

NASA instead proposes to build the Ares-I at a total cost of $14.4bn (a Government Accounting Office figure, not ours) and the current internal schedule indicates it will not be ready much before March 2016 - 8 years away (yes, I know NASA keeps saying March 2015 publicly, but internal documentation from the development teams themselves say otherwise).

Does this seem to be a good option?

IMHO, no. Especially when on top of that development program, NASA then plans to build a second gargantuan $15bn rocket - the Ares-V because the Ares-I alone can not enable Lunar missions without a 'big brother'.

NASA then proposes to do this at a time when the Baby Boomers are all beginning to retire placing huge demands on the Federal Reserve, oil prices are rising at a dreadful rate, we are in an expensive war, we have the largest national debt in history, the economy is faltering due to the mortgage crisis and a full-blown recession is now in effect.


I would venture to suggest that in this economic climate asking for more than one expensive rocket is a little hopeful and places the whole program at risk of being canceled before it is completed.


Further, the cost analysis has now been produced this year showing how much the new Ares launch vehicles are going to cost. Let me start by defining that the Atlas-V and Delta-IV programs together cost the DoD somewhere in the region of ~$3bn per year for all their launches combined. And the Space Shuttle Program costs about $3.1bn per year for all the flights in 2008.


Ares-I and Ares-V together are currently expected to cost between $7.5bn to $9.0bn per year. And that's without the cost of the Orion spacecraft or the new Altair Lunar Lander included.

NASA's entire yearly budget is only a little over $17bn per year for two Lunar missions per year. This is a figure 2.5 to 3 times the current cost of the Space Shuttle and would increase the portion of NASA's entire annual budget for launch vehicles from ~18% to a whopping ~53% just to pay for the launches.

I question whether this is a realistic expectation or if it isn't simply tempting the same fates as those which resulted in Apollo being canceled prematurely after just 6 landings between 1969-1972? Is this a sustainable



Schedule:

In the spring of 2006, about half a year after the ESAS Report "validated" (ask me about that some time!) the exact same plan which Administrator Michael Griffin had previously proposed in a 2003 Planetary Society paper he co-authored, Griffin went on record as saying he hoped the ESAS CLV (later to be called Ares-I) and the CEV (later to be named Orion) would be ready as early as 2012 to fulfill the President's direction of closing the gap after Shuttle prior to the end of 2014.

Since then, a series of changes and problems (perpetual low performance, SSME problems with air-starting forcing the change to J-2S derivative itself forcing the change to new 5-segment SRB, Thrust Oscillation etc) have caused a round-a-bout fight between the launch vehicle team and the spacecraft team which is still going on today. Every time the analysis is run, the numbers come up short of performance in some way or another. The Orion team tells the Ares-I team they need more performance in order to give their spacecraft all of the necessary capabilities to protect a crew for a mission to the moon. The Ares-I team come back and essentially say "we're givin' it all she can give Cap'n" because essentially the 5-segment SRB and the J-2X can only deliver a certain amount of performance no matter what else you do. But that simply hasn't been enough.

The Orion project was forced, last year, to shave a number of systems out of the design. Systems such as Land Landing capabilities (all-but essential if we ever want to save money by reusing the capsules because sea water really makes a big mess of things) have been "left in the parking lot". Even safety systems have been compromised in this effort, which I'll get to in a minute.

In essence this constant go-around between Orion begging for more performance and Ares-I not being able to deliver it has caused the project to spend a lot more time and money trying to find alternative and sometimes rather "exotic" solutions. These have had the result of slowing the project down considerably.

Orion has thus been forced to choose many of the most expensive and exotic solutions just to get the mass of the spacecraft down so that it can fly on Ares-I. This is driving up the development costs further (with a fixed budget this means a longer development time) and is driving the manufacturing and operations costs up once it goes operational as well.

What does this ultimately mean? Well, Orion's first crew flight on an Ares-I is 'publicly' still scheduled for March 2015 - at 65% confidence level.

Internally though, the development team have a different date as of a few months ago - March 2016.

So, for two years of effort so far on Ares-I, the schedule has slipped from Griffin's original prediction by 4 years and continues to slip because more and more budgetary items keep coming down the pipe.


Safety:

As I mentioned previously, safety systems originally planned for Orion have been "left in the the parking lot" because Ares-I doesn't actually have sufficient performance to safely lift the full-spec Orion as originally envisioned. "Out" now, include two of the four originally proposed micro-meteroid protection layers having been deleted from the design now, and anti-radiation shielding also sitting in the parking lot.

Worse than that though, dual-redundancy on all systems was originally touted as a major safety feature of the CEV by the ESAS team. But today, that is no longer the case. A number of the systems on-board are currently reduced down to just single-fault tolerant specifications. But this is the spacecraft which is being built in large part in response to the loss of Columbia - how can we justify such safety compromises on the spacecraft which is going to be the backbone for the US human space program for the next 30-40 years.

Haven't we learned the right lessons from Columbia and Challenger - that a compromised design at the start can only lead to very dark places later?

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
-George Santayana


Performance (also includes a lot of Politics, sorry!):

Getting to the Moon and out towards Mars is *all* about the amount of payload you can lift. The performance of your architecture is critically important. Combined with how much it costs determines very precisely what the limits will be for what you will ever be able to achieve with the systems.

You need to be able to lift seriously large quantities of mass from the depths of the Earth's gravity well if we are ever going to do more than just "Flags and Footprints" missions. And we have a limited budget. So whatever solution we choose needs to be the best possible value for lifting the sorts of quantities we need.

So it's all about performance. Yet Ares-I doesn't have sufficient performance to go anywhere near the moon. It's far too small to launch a Lunar mission on. So why Ares-I?

As I have already explained, at the root of all Orion problems is Ares-I.

At the root of all cost problems is Ares-I.

At the root of all schedule problems is Ares-I.

So: "Why is NASA so set on building Ares-I?"


Well, actually "NASA" isn't. The teams developing Ares-I aren't so set on it as a few select people within Upper Management - in particular one Dr. Michael D Griffin - NASA Administrator.

The development teams at MSFC want a challenge for sure, but they are also already all-too familiar with Ares-I's flaws. Today they would be quite happy to get away from Ares-I if Upper Management hadn't dug its heels in so hard against all other alternatives.

So the question becomes "Why does Upper Management want Ares-I then?"

It's all to do with the big brother launcher - the Ares-V.

I refer you once again to Mike Griffin's many previous papers and many of his public speeches. At a Breakfast Gathering for the Space Transportation Association on January 22nd of this year Mike went on at length about how losing the Heavy Lift capability of Apollo/Saturn being lost in the 1970's.

He is correct that this loss has essentially caused us to be locked into Low Earth Orbit ever since. With the Medium-Lift of the currently unmanned vehicles we would have to build a quarter of an ISS every time we need to go to the moon - which is pretty impractical for a robust new program.

You see, Mike is and always has been a "Big Rocket" guy. His focus has always been on Mars, and the general rule for Mars missions is the bigger your rocket the fewer launches you need. This is all true. But the principle doesn't even try take into account how much these things actually *cost*.

Mike basically wants to replace the Saturn-V. Better still, he'd like to improve upon it.

Whether that's an ego thing, and that he just wants to be remembered ahead of Werner von Braun as developing an even bigger rocket or not, the jury is still out, but good friends of his say it has been his dream for a *very* long time to do so.


Getting away from Performance for a second, I must return to Cost to get some understanding of Ares-V. To build a big rocket obviously costs big money. If NASA wanted to build Ares-V straight-up, it would be a $30bn project.

Cough. Splutter. Congress would choke if Griffin came to them, cap in hand like a modern day Oliver Twist and begged for double NASA's entire yearly budget just to build a nice shiny new rocket. There was never a chance in hell of doing that.

But there was a chance of developing about half the technology on a smaller rocket first for about half that sum. And here is where Ares-I comes from. For $14bn, NASA develops the 5-segment SRB and the J-2X engine and gets a smaller launcher operating a bit sooner than a gargantuan one could - closing the gap a little bit in the process. At that point the Ares-V no longer has to absorb the costs of J-2X or 5-segment SRB, and its costs come down to a more palletable level - around $15bn.

NASA is still going to Congress for $30bn for Griffin's big rocket, but it's in more 'bitesize' pieces and might not choke them.

But it adds a major risk to the whole plan. That the small vehicle gets built and one of the many different Congresses or Presidents who will monitor this development program might cut its throat before they have finished development.

Between now (mid 2008) and the end of 2020 (the new target for a Return to the Moon) there will be either 3 or 4 different Presidents occupying the White House and there will have been 6 different Congressional elections too, cycling the entire Senate into it's third cycle and the House into its 6th.

Even just to the March 2016 first flight of Orion, the President we elect later this year will be at the very end of their second term - when a political scoop like this can have no tangible political benefit for the incumbent - when that beastie flies. What personal motivation do any of the Political leaders have to lend their support to NASA in this endeavour? Sure they can and should do it for the 'benefit of the nation' - but *really* - how many political figures do things purely for that reason alone with no way to benefit their states or themselves? I'd wager: Not as many as we'd like.

So we wonder what's really going to happen...

Ares-I is under performance, over budget and is going to be late. Yet NASA expects Congress to authorize them to build a second, much more complicated and just as expensive launcher *as well*? A launcher which will result in an architecture gobbling up more than 50% of NASA's annual budget when it goes operational - and thus strangling even tighter the already-halved budgets of both the NASA Aeronautics andthe NASA Science Mission Directorates?

Do we all start to see the short-sightedness of the current plans?



So what are the alternatives?

Well, ISS isn't too much of a performance problem. 20mT to LEO is achievable for most of the options 'out there'. So ISS isn't the real limiting factor in terms of the "big picture".

To perform the new expanded "Lunar missions Ares requires one small launch vehicle and one gargantuan launch vehicle to be launched together and together they need to lift about 160mT in order to perform the "Apollo on Steroids" missions officially defined as - 4-crew, 7-day sortie missions or 6-month outpost missions, global access (Apollo could only visit the moon's equatorial areas, Constellation wants to be able to go everywhere) and anytime-return (get the crew home at any time in case of an emergency).

Mars missions are still only in the most vague planning stages still, but are going to require about 500-600mT to be lifted from Earth every time we go - approximately the same mass as the fully-completed ISS will be.

So what do we have available right now?

Well the US has the Atlas and Delta. Both of which are capable of lifting about 20-25mT on a Heavy configuration. These are fine for ISS missions. But you'd need about 7 or more per lunar mission. If you want more than one or two Lunar missions per year you start talking some very serious production numbers and very tight launch schedules - the logistics get real tough above 3 missions per year.

But we are lucky enough to have a Heavy Lift launch vehicle available today which has already flown more than 100 times - and its a human-rated system already too. Every time it launches it places about 115mT of payload into orbit - which is about 85% of the mass Ares-V would be trying to launch.

It's the Space Shuttle.


It has a key problem though - that winged spacecraft riding on the side of the stack during launch is a very complicated and extremely delicate spacecraft - and it just has no way for crews to escape when things go wrong. Worse still, the spaceplane itself accounts for about 100mT of the total payload brought up to space, leaving only about 15mT for actual usable payload. That's a really poor proportion as these things go.

If only the Space Shuttle hardware could be reconfigured to reverse that performance proportion and to address the additional cost concern of no longer recovering the main engines, and if the crew could be placed on the very top with an escape system to pull them away when things go badly...

To reverse the performance you need to swap the very heavy spaceplane "carrier" for a very lightweight Payload Fairing on the top. Now you can lift a lot more useful payload instead of "carrier".


To reduce the cost of the Space Shuttle main engines, you can use engines which are designed to be cheap enough to throw away - like the main engines from the Delta-IV - the RS-68. You lose a little performance, but use three of them and an Upper Stage and you can lift more than 100mT of useful payload.


And place the crew in a small capsule on the top of the vehicle with an escape system and you have a remarkably safe launch configuration which benefits from 25 years of heritage and continual safety improvements.


It's rocket science, but it ain't brain surgery

The basic plan behind DIRECT is one which has been considered many times since even before the first Shuttle flight. NASA even tried to build it with the USAF around 1993 (ALS/NLS) but Congress just wouldn't pay for anything more than Shuttle at the time (and remember *that* fact when you consider Ares is expected to cost 3 times the cost of Shuttle!).

Instead of the 'lets build two new launchers' plan, we propose to do the minimum possible to the existing Shuttle systems, to turn it into a single system which can produce more performance to ISS than Ares-I and when flown two-at-a-time can outperform Ares-I & Ares-V together (Ares-V doesn't achieve the minimum requirement of 1 in 1000 Loss of Crew so won't ever be flown by humans I might add) for Lunar missions. It can also perform the Mars missions too using exactly the same number of flights as Ares too.

But Jupiter-120 removes most of the expensive items from the development path and that helps to 1) close the gap by more than 3 years compared to Ares-I, and 2) costs an awful lot less to develop than Ares-I. Adding the Upper Stage (as Ares-V) but without having to develop a whole second launcher also cuts costs massively for the Lunar phase of the program too. Our Presentation on our website (download both this PowerPoint Show and this Video Animation into the same folder on your computer to see the whole thing, and here is an accompanying "voiceover" in text form) does a good job of highlighting the advantages of this alternative path.



As for the name "Jupiter" - That was a tribute to von Braun. His team originally created the first "Jupiter-C" (a modified Redstone missile) which got America into the space race.

That same team went on to design the Saturn-1 which was built at Michoud in New Orleans. That evolved into the famous Saturn-V, and it can be argued that it evolved eventually into the Shuttle's External Tank too. Being based on ET, the Core tank of our concept vehicle has a direct heritage back to the original Jupiter.

But truth be told: We really don't care what the vehicle is ultimately called!

We have deliberately kept the path clear for NASA to take our ball and run with it whenever they are ready. They could easily do so by renaming the two vehicles "Ares-II" and "Ares-III" and claiming them for their own. We're more than okay with that idea. In fact, that would actually be our preferred way to conclude this effort - for NASA to claim it as their own. At the end of the day - it really is anyway because it is the product of 57 of their own engineers and is based on the NLS work of the Marshall Space Flight Center anyway. While we don't exactly see eye-to-eye with NASA on the question of which launcher they should use, you must realize that we still have a vast passion for the success of both NASA and the Constellation Program.


I hope that helps explain *some* (sadly not all, there is more, but this post is already too long!) of the reasoning for our efforts.

Ross.

[kraisee]

I am curious how far a long the proposal is?

-Bob

Bob,
It's coming along pretty well. We visited D.C. back in March and got an excellent reception there from all four quadrants of Congress (Left, Right, Senate and House). Both that trip and another presentation at the recent ISDC Conference, also in D.C., have brought some amazing contacts our way.

With the problems Ares is suffering I think that effort is less than a few years away from totally collapsing under its own weight anyway, so we're trying to make sure we simply stay visible and reach a wider audience in both the NASA community and also the political world so that when the time is right NASA can simply grab the ball and just run with it.

We have had independent confirmation that our performance numbers are good. We have had independent confirmation that our budgets are *very *conservative indeed. I should mention here that we have explicitly tried to pack lots of extra margins over and above normal NASA ones in to everything we've done; budget, performance, safety etc etc. We've done this partly as a 'fudge factor' because our 64-person team doesn't have the full resources of the whole of NASA, but mostly to also try to head-off-at-the-pass the typical problems which all such big NASA program have that can threaten to de-rail an effort like this. We have done so because we keep watching what they're suffering from right now over on Ares-I and don't ever want to be in that same boat ourselves.

Our key goal right now though, is to expand the number of people familiar with the concept. That's why I've jumped at the chance to discuss the DIRECT proposal here on Rick's new forum.

Ross.

[Bob]

Off the top, I would like to thank Rick [I do not know his last name] for the website update. I like it a lot, especially the ground covered.

Ross, is it possible to provide verification links to some of what you say? Part of what you write seems to be subjective. Only because there is not really any corroborating info in relation to the stats you mention.

thank you for taking the time to respond.

-Bob

[Andrew]

Ross:

Are ya'll integrating a DIRECT 2.0 push into the rally at Port Canaveral next week when the U.S. Senate Subcommittee is there for hearings?

-Andrew

[Spacenut]

I do wish I could be there, for whatever reason!

[Bob]

Bob,
Both that trip and another presentation at the recent ISDC Conference, also in D.C., have brought some amazing contacts our way.

Opps, I nearly forgot to ask what the ISDC Conference was? Who was there and what positions were represented? many, all?


- Bob

[kraisee]

Sorry I've been absent this week - I've been moving house so haven't had much net access.

Let me tackle the new questions so far though...

Off the top, I would like to thank Rick [I do not know his last name] for the website update. I like it a lot, especially the ground covered.

Ross, is it possible to provide verification links to some of what you say? Part of what you write seems to be subjective. Only because there is not really any corroborating info in relation to the stats you mention.

thank you for taking the time to respond.

-Bob

Bob - We have tons of documentation and reference material. Can you narrow down the subjects you're specifically after and I'll rustle something up for you. We can make it an ongoing process if you like - ask for some things now, then others later etc and we can build up quite a library if we keep it up



Oh - and the ISDC 2008 Conference http://www.isdc2008.org/ is the annual International Space Development Conference - essentially a 'bring the whole industry together and discuss the future' get-together. It's a fairly major event in the political calendar when it comes to all-things space-related. Everyone was there. Mike Griffin and some of his colleagues, all the contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, Grumman etc) had representatives, the new alt-space community was represented by Elon Musk (Space-X) and Burt Rutan (Scaled Composites) amongst others. All three Presidential Candidates (at the time) also had sent representatives to appear on a single panel introduced by CNN's Miles O'Brien too - although a lot of what they all said wasn't very popular. ISDC is a *big* annual event.

We had a 30 minute presentation, were followed by the Eric Boethin, President of the Denver Colorado chapter of the National Space Society (NSS were hosting the event!) who also wanted to talk about DIRECT, so we ended up with a full 60 minute slot!

After that our guy there (Steve Metschan) and Eric spent the next 90 minutes out in the corridors answering more questions for everyone - including some *very* famous people who amazed us!

Ross.

[kraisee]

Ross:

Are ya'll integrating a DIRECT 2.0 push into the rally at Port Canaveral next week when the U.S. Senate Subcommittee is there for hearings?

-Andrew

Yes. We have a leaflet campaign planned where we will be handing out hundreds of DIRECT leaflets to all the visitors. We believe some of the press may be covering our activities too.


Ross.

[Rick]

I will venture a guess that Ross has dumped this website.

It's too bad, as although I totally disagree with him about Direct, I do respect the work he has done ont it.

It's ashame, and sorry that he feels that the site is not worth his time to visit.

Onward....

[JimMcDade]

There is always a fight when the U.S. Government makes a commitment to pour money into anything. I wish that all of the wannabe James Webbs out there would do more to help educate their fellow citizens about the need to continue space exploration.

This unnecessary dispute over DIRECT is not helpful to the space cause. Personally, I want to see men and women working on the Moon and Mars soon. I don't care if NASA puts rocket engines on the Big Boy statue (Dr. Evil style). I just want NASA to go somewhere other than flying loops around the world.

I apologize to those would prefer to perfect the world before we leave it, but if we choose that course of action, the human species is doomed.

In 1962, James Webb was called to the White House carpet when Brainerd Holmes went public with a report that the Apollo program was going to need an extra $400 million (about $2-3 billion in today's money) for the planned Apollo vehicles. Webb explained to Kennedy how the costs of rockets and aircraft always exceed the original competitive bid amounts. Webb told Kennedy that part of the problem is that bid competitors are forced to "look harder" at their proposal after they actually win a bid competition and that the contractors always find that "new requirements' must be added to the configuration. Webb said, "the process of defining (the spacecraft) more accurately usually adds to the cost".

The "new requirements" effect is exactly what has happened with Ares I. There is nothing unusual or unexpected occurring as Are I moves from the drawing board to the launch pad. The DIRECT 2.0 folks are either ignoring his "new requirements" effect or they are just uninformed.

We need to stop wasting time with the wannabe von Brauns and James Webbs. For me, one worry is that the next American on the moon will have to pass through Chinese customs when he or she gets there. I know that possibility doesn't bother most of our elite citizens who are so "politically evolved", but it does bother me.

BTW- James Webb fired Apollo program dissident Nick Golovin, a NASA systems reliability analyst, after Golovin mounted a DIRECT2.0-type hissy fit. Golovin was swearing to the world that LOR (Lunar Orbit Rendezvous) was unsafe and it would never get Apollo to the moon before the end of the decade of the 1960s. DIRECT 2.0 is deja vu' all over again!

[Rick]

One can only wonder how much these alleged 50+ NASA workers have gotten themselves into some kind of trouble.

Nearly every industry have ethics departments to listen to grievences from their employees, and have the option to be anonymous as well.

It doesn't make any sense to me at all that someone with a career like this would possibly throw it away.