Nasa engineers work overnigth in competition against other Nasa engineers !!

Mike Ciavarella — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:55:55 -0400

NASA Engineers Work on Alternative Moon Rocket

By Jay Reeves
Associated Press Writer
posted: 14 July 2008
05:23 pm ET

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — By day, the engineers work on
NASA's new Ares moon rockets. By night, some go undercover to work on a
competing design. These dissenting scientists and their backers insist they
have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to
build than the two Ares spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle.

They call their project Jupiter, and like Ares, it's a
brainchild of workers at the Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA
facilities. The engineers involved are doing the work on their own time and
mostly anonymously, with the help of retirees and other space enthusiasts.

A key Ares project manager dismisses their design as
little more than a sketch on a napkin that won't work.

A spokesman for the competing effort, Ross Tierney, said
concerned engineers at NASA and some contractors want a review of the Ares
plans but can't speak out for fear of being demoted, transferred or fired.

The Jupiter design is being reviewed by a team of 57
volunteer engineers, from line engineers up to NASA middle managers, Tierney
said. Those numbers are dwarfed by NASA's Ares workforce, which has thousands
of government workers and contractors.

The head of the Ares office at Marshall said he can't
rule out the possibility that some of his people are involved with the
underground program.

"I don't know what people do on their own
time," Steve Cook said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

But Cook said he is familiar with the Jupiter project,
and he's not impressed. NASA informally reviewed plans for the rocket last fall
and determined the idea to be a flawed scheme based on shaky numbers.

"It's not feasible. We said, 'It doesn't work' and
moved on,'" Cook said.

Meanwhile, he said, work on the Ares I rocket is so far
along that the first test flight is less than a year away.

"We're down to the nuts and bolts ... on this rocket.
This is not a napkin drawing," he said.

The debate reflects disagreement over the direction of
U.S. spaceflight as NASA prepares to retire the shuttle in 2010. By 2015, the
agency plans to begin orbital flights with Ares I and a companion heavy-lift
cargo rocket, Ares V. Officials hope to return
astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Astronauts will ride into orbit in a capsule aboard the
Ares I, which will have a modified shuttle booster rocket at its core. They
will dock with a lunar stage that was carried aloft separately by an Ares V rocket
and head to the moon.

The Jupiter design would also require two separate launches
to get to the moon, but its rockets would both rely on a shuttle external tank
at their center. Some of the design concepts go back to proposals floated at
Marshall in the early 1980s. Others date to the early '90s, when Marshall
worked on a new rocket system that never flew.

Besides being a simpler, more powerful system, backers
say, the Jupiter rockets would save NASA $19 billion in development costs and
another $16 billion in operating costs over two decades.

The Government Accountability Office last year raised
questions about the cost of NASA's current plan for returning to the moon,
which a report estimated at $230 billion over 20 years. NASA said it already
has spent about $7 billion on Ares.

Steve Metschan, an engineer and former NASA contractor who
supports the Jupiter team, said the upcoming
presidential election could change NASA's plan. He accused NASA of
suppressing information that shows Jupiter would perform better than Ares.

"Our concern is that by the time everyone figures
this out, we will have destroyed our heavy-lift system," said Metschan, of
Seattle. "At the end of the day, all we're asking for is an independent
review of all this stuff."

Cook said all the estimates on Jupiter were preliminary,
and he denied critics' claims that NASA did a full-fledged study of the Jupiter
rocket or the engineers' alternate moon-mission program, which they call Direct
2.0.

NASA has looked at "all sorts" of proposed
designs, he said, and none was as powerful or safe as Ares.

This
rendering released by Direct Launcher shows a rocket design that
advocates say is a better alternative for returning to the moon than
the Ares rockets being built by NASA. The Jupiter 232 rocket on the
left would be used for cargo launches, while the version of the right
could launch both cargo and astronauts. By day, the engineers work on
NASA's new Ares moon rockets in Huntsville, Ala. By night, some go
undercover, working on a competing design. These dissenters and their
backers say their alternative rocket would be safer, cheaper and easier
to build than the two Ares spacecraft, which have already cost NASA $7
billion. The alternative project calls itself Direct 2.0. Credit: AP
Photo/Direct Launcher/Antonio Maia

The Ares V and Ares I rockets NASA plans to succeed its space shuttle fleet. Credit: NASA

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NASA computer generated animation of the Constellation Lunar Mission featuring new space suits. Credit: NAS

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Nasa engineers work overnigth in competition against other Nasa engineers !!