End Run

A small band of rogue rocketeers takes on the NASA establishment.

  • By Michael Klesius
  • AirSpaceMag.com, September 29, 2008
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Jupiter-120 Artist's depiction of the Jupiter-120 arriving at the launch pad.

Artwork by Philip Metschan | Copyright 2008 Directlauncher

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As for who’s right, in NASA’s view it’s the space agency’s 3,700 team members in over 200 organizations across the country against Direct Launcher’s 69 anonymous engineers.

Metschan and his team intend to keep working on their plans anyway, in case Ares fails or Griffin leaves NASA. At least one recent development has worked in Direct’s favor. Russia’s military incursion into Georgia stirred concerns of U.S. dependency on Soyuz vehicles and led several influential lawmakers to press the White House to keep the shuttle flying past 2010. That in turn led NASA to halt plans to begin ripping out the tooling for the shuttle’s external tank fabrication at the Michoud facility near New Orleans. Direct Launcher would use the same 8.4-meter fuel tanks as the current shuttle. Ares V, on the other hand, would use a 10-meter tank that requires all new tooling. Once NASA converts to manufacturing the larger size, Direct Launcher becomes a dead option.

Is it common to have such a determined group of engineers working on alternative plans at NASA?

“Oh sure,” says Roger Launius, senior space history curator at the National Air and Space Museum and chief historian at NASA between 1990 and 2002. “You’ve always got hobby shops. People are always working on stuff on the side. I remember a great example: the lifting body people. Back in the ’60s they couldn’t get funding. The focus was all on Apollo. All they got was about $20,000 at first. They built the M2-F1 [lifting body] out of plywood. Went down to L.A. and bought an old Pontiac, suped it up so it would do 180, and used it as a tow vehicle.”

Launius regards the parallel effort as a natural wellspring of activity from a creative bunch.

“You got a bunch of smart people who are used to solving problems,” he says. “Nothing to be surprised at. It’s really something to applaud. The question is, though, is this reality or is it pipe dreams? We’ll see. It’s easier to draw this stuff than it is to build and fly it.”

The rocket is transformative, literally. On the web site, a space shuttle launches atop two pillars of flame gushing from solid rocket boosters, just as we’ve seen for the last quarter century. Then the video morphs into an animation that freezes and rotates the vehicle back toward you. Invisible hands take the shuttle stack apart, like a child mixing and matching a toy. And a new rocket, the Jupiter 232, takes shape, using the external fuel tank and the boosters, but without the familiar spaceplane.

In the upper left corner of the screen appear the words: “Direct v2.0: simpler, safer, sooner.”

That description is a matter of some debate between the web site’s creators and NASA. The animation is the work of Philip Metschan, a graphic designer and concept artist at Pixar Studios in California. He produced it about a year and a half ago using the same kind of software used for Hollywood movies like Jurassic Park, The Golden Compass, and The Incredible Hulk.

But he’s just the artist. His brother Stephen, he says, is the brains behind the concept, known as Stephen Metschan insists that Direct is a more elegant way to send astronauts to the moon than the launcher NASA now plans to build. The agency has been spending billions on a pair of new rockets, the Ares I and V, which he says are unnecessarily complicated and expensive, and which fail to adhere to a Congressional mandate to use shuttle-derived rockets to the fullest extent possible.

Stephen Metschan, with a handful of colleagues, is among the most vocal critics of the Ares design. He says he’s supported by 69 active NASA and contract engineers—mostly at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and Kennedy Space Center in Florida—who remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs. At night and on weekends, the band of renegades keeps refining their Direct Launcher concept as an alternative to the Ares launchers. Should the political winds shift at NASA, Metschan thinks it’s still early enough in the program to switch to Direct, as much of the money spent on the moon program so far would still apply to his concept.

A decade ago, Metschan started his company, TeamVision Corporation, with a NASA Small Business Innovation Research grant. TeamVision makes Framework CT, an analysis tool that helps solve highly complex problems by sorting through millions of possibilities. Metschan soon found a meaty problem for the software: What’s the best way to convert the space shuttle’s existing parts into a design that will take astronauts to orbit and to the moon, with a new space capsule (called Orion) atop the vehicle, and with as few changes to the rest of the parts as possible?

One key advantage of Direct, say its creators, is that it uses the tried-and-true, four-segment version of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters rather than a new, five-segment version required for Ares. Adding the extra segment has caused engineering headaches for NASA due to the increased shaking produced by what is, by far, the largest solid rocket the world has ever seen. If left undamped, this “thrust oscillation” would feel like a massive jackhammer for the astronauts riding on top of the Ares.

NASA discovered the problem early in the design phase, and says that it has a solution: installing about 200 large springs in the bottom end of the booster, and another 200 in the top end, between the booster and the second, liquid-fueled stage. Dampers beneath the astronauts’ couches should reduce residual oscillations to a tolerable level, letting astronauts reach out and toggle a switch during ascent.

Metschan says the plan won’t work, and that the agency is clinging stubbornly to its Ares design without giving other ideas a chance. “In any normal organization, this would have been put in the dust bin of history,” he says.

He and two colleagues—Ross Tierney, who owns a model rocket business in Florida, and Chuck Longton, who used to work for NASA on liquid-fueled engines—are the public faces of Direct Launcher. All three claim that the real problem at NASA is close-mindedness, particularly on the part of Administrator Mike Griffin. To Metschan, it seemed that Griffin came to NASA in 2005 having already decided that Ares I and V were the only options. Direct Launcher, they say, never got a fair hearing.

“If your plan didn’t include Ares I,” says Metschan, “then your case was dead on arrival.”

NASA shrugs at such accusations.

“NASA has assessed over 1,700 launch vehicle options since the conclusion of ESAS [the Exploration Systems Architecture Study] in the summer of 2005,” says Steve Cook, NASA’s Ares I program manager. “The primary issue with all of the ‘Direct’ options, including the most recent variation released in late June, 2008, is that they fall short of our performance requirements. If a system can’t pass this primary gate, we do not perform more detailed analyses.”

Cook says the Direct proponents offer no methodology or data to support their claims of cost savings on their design for the central fuel tank; and that developing Jupiter’s core system, even with the fuel tank derived from the shuttle’s tank, would be far more expensive than the Direct proponents promise.

Furthermore, he says, Ares I and V are well under way, with Ares I having just concluded its Preliminary Design Review. The thrust oscillation problems, Cook admits, still need to be addressed in a follow-on review next summer, “to mature the design solution.” But he warns that restarting the program now would waste billions of dollars spent developing the integrated Ares I stack, including redoing 6,000 hours of wind tunnel tests.

In Government Accountability Office noted the technical risks facing the Ares program, but was not as pessimistic as Metschan about the chances of solving them: “We do not know yet whether the architecture and design solutions selected by NASA will work as intended,” concluded the authors.

As for who’s right, in NASA’s view it’s the space agency’s 3,700 team members in over 200 organizations across the country against Direct Launcher’s 69 anonymous engineers.

Metschan and his team intend to keep working on their plans anyway, in case Ares fails or Griffin leaves NASA. At least one recent development has worked in Direct’s favor. Russia’s military incursion into Georgia stirred concerns of U.S. dependency on Soyuz vehicles and led several influential lawmakers to press the White House to keep the shuttle flying past 2010. That in turn led NASA to halt plans to begin ripping out the tooling for the shuttle’s external tank fabrication at the Michoud facility near New Orleans. Direct Launcher would use the same 8.4-meter fuel tanks as the current shuttle. Ares V, on the other hand, would use a 10-meter tank that requires all new tooling. Once NASA converts to manufacturing the larger size, Direct Launcher becomes a dead option.

Is it common to have such a determined group of engineers working on alternative plans at NASA?

“Oh sure,” says Roger Launius, senior space history curator at the National Air and Space Museum and chief historian at NASA between 1990 and 2002. “You’ve always got hobby shops. People are always working on stuff on the side. I remember a great example: the lifting body people. Back in the ’60s they couldn’t get funding. The focus was all on Apollo. All they got was about $20,000 at first. They built the M2-F1 [lifting body] out of plywood. Went down to L.A. and bought an old Pontiac, suped it up so it would do 180, and used it as a tow vehicle.”

Launius regards the parallel effort as a natural wellspring of activity from a creative bunch.

“You got a bunch of smart people who are used to solving problems,” he says. “Nothing to be surprised at. It’s really something to applaud. The question is, though, is this reality or is it pipe dreams? We’ll see. It’s easier to draw this stuff than it is to build and fly it.”


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Comments (10)

Could this be a replay of the Earth Orbit Rendezvous versus Lunar Orbit Rendezvous decision? The underdog (Lunar Orbit) seemed preposterous at one time, but ended up as the final decision. Direct launcher seems like a credible idea.

Posted by John Anderson on September 30,2008 | 02:52 PM

For those of you with an aversion to Quicktime.
The animation is available on
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KuPtOKLCmzo
and you can check the performance figures for yourself at

http://www.directlauncher.com/

If I were POTUS (which I'm not) I would be asking for an _independent_ review of the options:
DIRECT, EELV, Shuttle-C, ...
If I were an American taxpayer (which I'm not) I would be writing to Congress....

Posted by David Lermit on October 2,2008 | 06:49 AM

Well, even if they are right about the external tank being more expensive to modify than the Direct guys think... it still has to be a LOT cheaper than the $35 billion Ares program. With Direct you are only taking an existing launch vehicle and modifying it. With Ares you are making 2 new launch vehicles, basically from the ground up (they don't even share the solid rocket boosters with the current shuttle anymore). And with 2 different launch vehicles, comes 2 new different infrastructures, 2 different manufacturing chains, 2 different workforces, 2 different mobile launch platforms, basically twice as much money to operate them. With Direct you use the current infrastructure, the current workforce, the current manufacturing chain, the current mobile launch platforms, etc. The only expensive part of the shuttle stack is the shuttle, and that is taken out of the equation. NASA was instructed to utilize all they could from the shuttle program, including workforce, hardware, components, infrastructure, etc... the Ares program does none of this, but the Direct/Jupiter program would do all of this. http://www.directlauncher.com/

Posted by Eric Sparks on October 6,2008 | 06:43 PM

Anything that can save over 10 billion dollars in this economic climate has got to be worth having a look at. I encourage NASA to study the architecture and explain why it is not going to work.

Posted by Nathan Rogers on October 7,2008 | 05:58 AM

I have read the Direct 2.0 proposal. Direct makes so much more sense than the current Ares launch vehicle architecture, it mystifies me as to why this has not been adopted. If anything, the Direct team is under-promising what this architecture can do. I truly hope NASA can shake the managerial fog they've been in the past few years and realize how much money, time and effort they are currently wasting. If not, the future of manned space flight could be very bleak indeed for the US.

Posted by Scott Hamann on October 7,2008 | 01:31 PM

Once again, NASA is "throwing away" a mature technology (i.e. shuttle-derived SRB's, tankage, etc.) in the same way they threw away the Saturn V vehicles that took us to the moon.

Whether the Direct Launcher concept will work (and be a better alternative to Ares) is not a question for any of us laypeople...but based on NASA management's track record, I believe we as taxpayers would all be better served with an independent, third party review of both architectures.

Interestingly enough, it sounds as if Direct's supporters welcome such an independent review, while NASA pooh-pooh's the idea. It seems to me that if NASA truly felt their case was the optimal method to move America's space program ahead, they wouldn't fear an independent review of their ideas.

Posted by Dean Fox on October 7,2008 | 10:46 PM

NASA is just making work for themselves and their contractor friends, that's all. Since they're probably the only ticket to the moon (so far) they don't care if they are starting from scratch. The only way that they'll give this concept a proper look is if Mr. Putin and the Chinese decide to get their hands on the moon's minerals.

Posted by Phil Thomas on October 8,2008 | 02:39 AM

Sorry, the fact is computer stuff advances faster than energy stuff. BTW, the same reason the internal combustion engine is going to be the way those of us without a trust fund get around for a long, long time.

So sure, the images of the new launcher are great, so what. Somewhere along the long line of equations, people like this always make an un-assuming assumption that breaks the bank.

Sort of like the DARPA people not telling us they "dumbed down" the autonomous vehicle test in the desert from the year of the disaster to the following year of great triumph. Or the Chevy Volt, that still has no battery supplier that has built more than a week supply, TOTAL (cars are made one a minute, period). Or the Very Light Jet Air Taxi (bye bye DayJet), or ...

BTW, I have no dog in the hunt (more than being a taxpayer). In fact, I personally really recent the fact the NASA PR machine claims having invented everything (from the microprocessor (TI?) to everything else).

Just wonder how much of this great promise energy equation they're "forgetting" to tell us. Nice pictures though.

Posted by Lu Figarella on October 13,2008 | 10:23 AM

despite the """free""" press NEVER talks about that, THIS is the TRUE story of "Direct": http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/033directstruestory.html
and THIS is the TRUE story of the """Google""" Lunar X Prize: http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/008moonprize.html

Posted by gaetano marano - ghostNASA.com on October 14,2008 | 02:58 AM

What a shame that America's space program is once again being compromised by decisions made by a political process rather than an engineering process. The use of false comparisons by NASA to rule out the use of EELV's*, and configurations similar to Direct so that Mr. Griffin can build the Ares 1 rocket (a configuration he advocated before coming to NASA) and the nonsensically huge Ares 5 rocket is a slap in the face to the hundreds of engineers who cannot fake things or ignore reality just to get what they want.
Have they forgotten so soon what noble prize winning Physicist Richard Feynman said when he was on the committee to investigate the Challenger shuttle disaster? "Nature cannot be fooled" he said, referring to the Laws of Physics. Unfortunately, what the current NASA administrators believe is summarized by this mans comments, an engineer who recently quit, "At the highest levels, there seems to be a belief that you can mandate reality, followed by a refusal to accept any information that runs counter to that mandate."**

Apparently, the management at NASA has learned nothing.

*(Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles {Delta IV and Atlas V})
**Jeff Finckenor - commenting about the NASA bureaucracy. He was an engineer there, but he quit in disgust.

Posted by Will Doohan on October 15,2008 | 01:27 AM

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