Monday, July 14, 2008

A new Moon Rocket proposal from an unusual source.

It would seem that the ranks are not all that closed among the engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The folks who are hard at work on NASA's follow on moon project Aries have defected, well sort of. Over a hundred engineers are convinced that they can do it cheaper, faster and quicker than their big government bosses. The "IT" is a moon rocket project they have dubbed Jupiter. They have created an alternative rocket that would be safer, cheaper and easier to build than the two Ares spacecraft, What makes the Jupiter program rather unusual is that NASA had full access to the project data before it settled on ARIES. However NASA managers admit that with flight tests less than a year away, NASA is too heavily invested in ARIES to consider alternative projects.

So if Jupiter is to work at all it will have to be funded and executed by private investments. hummmm Check out their site Direct 2.0

yahoo news via IO9

2 comments:

John said...

Hi,

I recently looked at Constellation and the Ares project and didn't hear anything about this.I guess it's where you look right?

As an engineer myself I'm familiar with the term "Tunnel Vision". It's when an engineer follows a path that he knows s the wrong one.

Looks like NASA may have a bit of tunnel vision.

Anonymous said...

Hi John
Yeah, this was the first I had heard of it as well.Whats even more interesting is that they are so organized! I don't think this is a Google thing...unless that is what they are trolling for...hummmm. Plus I found it unusual that NASA engineers would be so forthright about the project. Nasa has a history of slamming the lid on dissension.

Paul