Obama’s administration has ordered a 90-day review of the situation at NASA with the hope of chosing the best way to move our space exploration and science foward. A likely topic on the table is which mission architecture and space launch vehicles will get the job done – cheaper, better & faster?
Its at this time – before the fact finding and investigating begins – that a new article appears explaining how NASA attempted to discredit the DIRECT shuttle derived Jupiter launch vehicle proposal to replace the constellation programs Ares I and V rockets. The fundamentals are pretty straight foward, and the engineers working on the proposal have done a lot of work to nail down the details. It must have ticked quite a few of them off when NASA managers defending Ares tried to pull a fast one and misrepresent the DIRECT plan in thier official and initially internal analysis.
Get the whole story a nasaspaceflight.com where David Harris has an article on the subject, and download the DIRECT teams official rebuttal of the bogus 2007 NASA ‘analysis’
According to NASAspaceflight, “DIRECT anticipates being heavily involved in the upcoming Blue Ribbon review for human space flight – which will include an evaluation on NASA’s current exploration direction - and the team will be presenting their latest proposals at the Orlando ISDC conference at the end of May and will also have representatives there able to discuss the latest evolutions of the proposal.”
Lets hope NASA gets it right this time.
Filed under: Space
