Are NASA Employees Freelancing on Another Launch System?

Editor’s note: The following posting was made by someone who posts as “Kraisee” at nasaspaceflight.com. His real name is Ross Tierney. Tierney is a foreign national (U.K. citizen) and is one of the chief propagandists behind the “Direct” proposal – an alternate launch system some feel would be better than the Ares 1/V rockets NASA is developing. Their “Jupiter” concept was mentioned in a Senate hearing last week.

Have a look at this posting. Not only does Tierney publicly claim that he and his “team” have access to ITAR sensitive information, he proclaims that he has people on his team who actually work at MSFC and MAF who are doing detailed structural analysis for him. If this is true, then NASA civil servants and/or contractors are using their access to NASA resources that they are given by virtue of their jobs to work on a project that directly undermines NASA’s official Ares program. Questions for Steve Cook: Who is paying for this? Who approved this freelancing at NASA? Is anyone in charge?

“You ever heard about this funny thing called ITAR? Discussing the size and dimensions of the Stiffening Blades and Membranes on the 3rd barrel section of the LH2 tank would most definitely be covered under that, which is why we won’t ever talk about such details on any public forum.

While I have steered myself personally away from such information, there are people in the team – specifically a group at at MSFC & MAF – who do have that specific data already. When we have talked previously about changing setting on the milling machines, I’m not kidding – that team have analyzed the current tanking and manufacturing equipment, and have all the STS load data references, and they have calculated loads for Jupiter using NASA’s tools, NLS data references, LV-24/25 references and Ares-I and Ares-V references as well. Then they have taken that data and added appropriate margins as defined by regular NASA standards for GR&A and such things as FS 1.4 and a host of other things I’m admittedly not very familiar with myself. This has determined the loadings which the structure will actually require in the worst-possible-case scenario. We then requested a 20% additional arbitrary load on top for the first (SWT) structure variant. With this, they re-calculated the structural requirements of both the expected (LWT) and the early-flight version (SWT). “