/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12750415
>There is a scary timeline out there where SpaceX doesn’t exist and instead SLS is our only hope and Richard Shelby is a hero to spaceflight fans for defending our beyond earth orbit launch capabilities from harm
Back when Constellation was still going there was an alternative proposal by engineers called Direct, which was more closely based on the Shuttle than Ares and simpler. A lot of spaceflight fans held Direct up as a better option. At the time they were the rebels against the NASA establishment. SLS is quite similar to Direct.

>>12581623
and this

>>12190188
>>12190181
Which is retarded because DIRECT was designed to reduce the manned spaceflight gap with the first Jupiter, it was all lower scale and scope than SLS, it should have been prioritized first then an SLS like heavy lifter like the latter Jupiters

It's so stupid that they didn't focus on restoring ISS access first, which was the main goal of DIRECT...

>>12011833
Orange planet, orange rocket

>>11714462
It was supposed to be so simple, so straightforward.

>>11530339
>Pretty anemic looking second stage there

It doesn’t have one, this Jupiter variant was for LEO.

>>10594523
A lot of people say that. I'm certain it played a part, but consider that at the time the DIRECT people were appearing in congressional meetings and basically rebelling against NASA management to argue for shuttle-derived architecture. If the contractors played a part, it was a secondary one.

Of course, the DIRECTfags only wanted that shuttle architecture because they were trying to minimize that gap between shuttle and its successor as much as possible. Unfortunately, when NASA switched to 5-seg SRBs and decided to stretch the core tank, any chance of that went out the window.

The modern SLS core tank is only similar to the shuttle ET in the fact it contains Hydrolox fuel and has orange insulation. There's little to no design commonality other than that, because it had to be redesigned to withstand the stresses of 4 SSMES and 5-seg SRBs.

>>10473187
>only thing new was the crew module and upper stage
>everything else was direct shuttle hardware

>>10323120
Correct on all fronts save budget. Only 40% (for now). The existence of the Jupiter family and the DIRECT program in general, as well as the fact that it got canned in favor of Ares made me mad as hell.
>>10324783
I ask my self "why not" about that very topic every time I see SLS.

What did you guys think about the DIRECT launch system?

>>7506449
>Kind of shows how this idea of evolving the SLS into a higher-performance rocket is especially terrible.

That makes sense, a lot of these are problems many other rocket designs had over time.

N-1 had that problem, the Saturns even had rattling problems initially, and the Ares I showed that they'd even fly the rocket knowing that it was a stupid idea.

Do you have any sources for this though? I'd love to read more on it.