Jupiter DIRECT - Livestream Discussion - Sat 11/11/2023

[catdlr]

PS: Probably a good idea if someone can download a copy of the archived YouTube stream and discussion and attach here on this thread for posterity. Am in the middle of a move and do not have the resources to do it myself.

leovinus,
I have downloaded a copy for my archives.  I've requested permission to post on this thread.  Chris B. usually doesn't allow that if it's on YouTube because it costs NSF storage to maintain a copy.  But I do know from experience that many old NSF threads, with YouTube posts, are no longer available (i.e., broken links) because some YouTube channels have been deleted or disappeared for copyright issues, etc.  Once I get authorization, I'll post in this thread.  It's 1.9GB. (3hr55m) at 1080P.   I may have to split it up into one-hour segments.   I will also upload a copy to my own YouTube Channel for another archive location.

Best,
Tony

PS: Probably a good idea if someone can download a copy of the archived YouTube stream and discussion and attach here on this thread for posterity. Am in the middle of a move and do not have the resources to do it myself.

We can't reupload content from youtube channel. No one ever do that please.

Thanks Chris.
OK, we got the answer from Chris, as I predicted, "NO".  I'll post a copy on my YouTube channel as a secondary location in case the original link gets deleted.

Best
Tony.

[catdlr]

As promised, here is a secondary YouTube location for the Live Stream.  Use it only if the primary is no longer available.  I maintain a full physical copy of this on my personal file media and a Backup Cloud Server as well.

[spacenut]

Could Direct have worked with 4 strap on Falcon 9's after F9 became operational?  This would have made it less costly to operate.

Also, wouldn't it have been cheaper for NASA to develop an upper stage off the SSME than develop the larger solids or even the J2X? 

This would have greatly increased the LEO payload. 

These are all hindsight questions.

I know back then, Downix, I believe that was his forum name, came up with an idea for AJAX.  This would have used Atlas V's boosters instead of solids on the core.  He had it figured from 2 to 8 Atlas V's on the core to dial up the payloads. 

[clongton]

I know back then, Downix, I believe that was his forum name, came up with an idea for AJAX.  This would have used Atlas V's boosters instead of solids on the core.  He had it figured from 2 to 8 Atlas V's on the core to dial up the payloads. 

Yes it was a good approach, but it violated the fundamental approach of DIRECT; to use the existing STS infrastructure, personnel and hardware with as little change as possible. Other than that I loved Ajax. It was the American answer to the Soviet Vulcan, the Heavy Lift varient of the Energia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia_(rocket)

[Zed_Noir]

Could Direct have worked with 4 strap on Falcon 9's after F9 became operational?  This would have made it less costly to operate.
<snip>

Had discussions with @Lobo on using Falcon 9s as strapped-on boosters for the Direct core.

That would be the Falcon 9 v1.1 variant as boosters. Which was also the cores for the never build Falcon F9H tri-core launcher that had estimated performance similar to an expended Falcon 9 Block 5.

After the appearance of the Falcon 9 Full Thrust, the predecessor to the Block 5. It's apparent to me that SpaceX has a path toward a competing launcher versus Direct.
 

[spacenut]

Yes, I forgot that FH is almost a direct competitor to the vanilla version of Direct.  FH with a 5.5m upper stage and a smaller thrust Raptor could get probably 70+ tons to LEO.  Probably at a lower cost. 

Direct was a quicker and more simple solution than Ares I and V and would have cost a lot less to develop.  We would already have a cis-lunar program if it was developed using existing 4 segment solids and existing SSME's.  No new development costs for solids or RS-25's.  Same size tankage as shuttle just reinforced to carry an upper stage or Orion.  Existing Delta IV upper stage could have been used for an upper stage.  Lots of ifs and inches. 

[Jim]

Other boosters like Atlas or Falcon would require a redesign of the core to be lifted from the base and eliminate the SRB beam.

[kraisee]

Jim's right. The existing EELV class rockets at the time - Atlas-V, Delta-IV and Falcon-9 - are simply not designed for this sort of operation - the load paths through the structures are all wrong.

I'm sure that with a big enough contract SpX could have redesigned Falcon-9 to work as a SDLV booster (and probably do so in half the time it would have taken ULA to do similar) but that was never something NASA considered doing.

Regardless of the technical aspects, never forget the band of 800 lb gorilla's in the room:   The politics of the decision making process.

The politics throughout the period we're talking about - 2006 to 2011 - would never have aligned behind any other booster solutions except ATK's SRB's. Even the awesome lobbying power of Boeing and Lockheed *combined* couldn't do anything to alter that reality.

Even today - nearly two decades after ESAS - ATK's boosters are still a fundamental core part of the SLS program and there is no real discussion about using someone else's products on SLS instead.

The politicians write all of NASA's checks. The agency does exactly what it is paid to do. And nothing else.

Ross.

[kraisee]

Yes, I forgot that FH is almost a direct competitor to the vanilla version of Direct.  FH with a 5.5m upper stage and a smaller thrust Raptor could get probably 70+ tons to LEO.  Probably at a lower cost. 

Direct was a quicker and more simple solution than Ares I and V and would have cost a lot less to develop.  We would already have a cis-lunar program if it was developed using existing 4 segment solids and existing SSME's.  No new development costs for solids or RS-25's.  Same size tankage as shuttle just reinforced to carry an upper stage or Orion.  Existing Delta IV upper stage could have been used for an upper stage.  Lots of ifs and inches. 

Don't forget that Falcon 9 only flew for the very first time one year before DIRECT *finished* and only flew twice in total while DIRECT was still running.

For 80% of DIRECT's efforts, SpaceX had only the tiny Falcon 1's limited flight record (ultimately two successes out of five flights) to show. It was not much of a comparison at the time.

Falcon Heavy didn't fly until seven years after everyone at DIRECT had already hung up our coats.

The truth is, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy simply were not seriously on anyone's radar at the time we're talking about - at least not the decision makers in D.C.

They've certainly come a long way since then, but it would still take a whole decade after these events, before NASA would even consider planning it's human exploration program using their systems for the first time.

Ross.

[deltaV]

Don't forget that Falcon 9 only flew for the very first time one year before DIRECT *finished* and only flew twice in total while DIRECT was still running.

A rational government in ~2011 would indeed not have bet the human spaceflight program solely on SpaceX given their then-lousy record. Instead a rational government would have invested in several 40+ tonnes to LEO commercial vehicles e.g. Falcon Heavy and an upgraded Atlas and designed the human spaceflight program around them. However Ross may be right that rational government would not have been politically feasible.

[kraisee]

Don't forget that Falcon 9 only flew for the very first time one year before DIRECT *finished* and only flew twice in total while DIRECT was still running.

A rational government in ~2011 would indeed not have bet the human spaceflight program solely on SpaceX given their then-lousy record. Instead a rational government would have invested in several 40+ tonnes to LEO commercial vehicles e.g. Falcon Heavy and an upgraded Atlas and designed the human spaceflight program around them. However Ross may be right that rational government would not have been politically feasible.

Depends on your measure of "rational".

- Is it rational to plan the next 20+ years of the national human spaceflight program, using a rocket from a company that in 2011 had only demonstrated a 57% success rate (3 failures, 4 successes) and who were still many years away from flying a Heavy configuration, and were frankly only talking about a Heavy at the time, and were still a ways from getting seriously into the process of designing it?

- Is it irrational for a Senator to fight for more money and jobs in the district where they were elected to do precisely that?

- Is it irrational to depend on contractors who have been delivering good products for decades instead of looking at yet-another-upstart company that may or may not make it?    And remember there were a vast number of such companies that littered the landscape prior to SpaceX coming on the scene - there were probably 100+ startups that tried and failed before SpaceX actually made it, they were utterly unique in that regard, nobody else had succeeded. To name but a few; Beal, Kisler, Amroc, Pioneer, Rotary, EER, Pacific American, Kelly, Universal Spacelines, Space Transportation Corp. - all had flared briefly only to fizzle to nothing. Honestly, there were few people - at that time in the early 2000's - who genuinely thought SpaceX would be any different.

- Is it irrational to choose to give contracts to all of the contractors who have been dedicated to the program for all those decades, instead of just selecting a few and slamming the door on the rest? (I'm specifically talking about excluding ATK by choosing to go with Boeing/LM Heavy EELV's exclusively)


At the time of this decision making process, SpaceX simply hadn't yet accomplished enough to be in the running. Any notion of them being involved, is based purely on a false perspective that you only get years further down the timeline, after things had started to change and SpaceX had been given the time necessary to demonstrate what they could ultimately achieve. I personally don't think that general perspective really "switched" until they started trying to land boosters with the first F9 v1.1 in September 2013 - That's when the whole industry really started to pay attention - and that was still two years into the future, compared to the final events of this thread.

The politics of the time (2006-2011) were firmly - nay, strictly - aligned behind ATK, Boeing and LM ... Period.

Any proposal that didn't focus on those three was simply dead before anyone even looked at the shiny brochures. Sorry to be blunt, but that's the unvarnished truth of the political landscape at that time. The various Senators and Congress-people who were in charge of the purse strings for NASA's budget at that time wanted the program setup that way because it benefited their own districts, and thus their own reelection hopes. As a result, no project that didn't fit that model, would get even a second glance.

Ross.

[Eric Hedman]

Don't forget that Falcon 9 only flew for the very first time one year before DIRECT *finished* and only flew twice in total while DIRECT was still running.

A rational government in ~2011 would indeed not have bet the human spaceflight program solely on SpaceX given their then-lousy record. Instead a rational government would have invested in several 40+ tonnes to LEO commercial vehicles e.g. Falcon Heavy and an upgraded Atlas and designed the human spaceflight program around them. However Ross may be right that rational government would not have been politically feasible.

Depends on your measure of "rational".

- Is it rational to plan the next 20+ years of the national human spaceflight program, using a rocket from a company that in 2011 had only demonstrated a 57% success rate (3 failures, 4 successes) and who were still many years away from flying a Heavy configuration, and were frankly only talking about a Heavy at the time, and were still a ways from getting seriously into the process of designing it?

- Is it irrational for a Senator to fight for more money and jobs in the district where they were elected to do precisely that?

- Is it irrational to depend on contractors who have been delivering good products for decades instead of looking at yet-another-upstart company that may or may not make it?    And remember there were a vast number of such companies that littered the landscape prior to SpaceX coming on the scene - there were probably 100+ startups that tried and failed before SpaceX actually made it, they were utterly unique in that regard, nobody else had succeeded. To name but a few; Beal, Kisler, Amroc, Pioneer, Rotary, EER, Pacific American, Kelly, Universal Spacelines, Space Transportation Corp. - all had flared briefly only to fizzle to nothing. Honestly, there were few people - at that time in the early 2000's - who genuinely thought SpaceX would be any different.

- Is it irrational to choose to give contracts to all of the contractors who have been dedicated to the program for all those decades, instead of just selecting a few and slamming the door on the rest? (I'm specifically talking about excluding ATK by choosing to go with Boeing/LM Heavy EELV's exclusively)


At the time of this decision making process, SpaceX simply hadn't yet accomplished enough to be in the running. Any notion of them being involved, is based purely on a false perspective that you only get years further down the timeline, after things had started to change and SpaceX had been given the time necessary to demonstrate what they could ultimately achieve. I personally don't think that general perspective really "switched" until they started trying to land boosters with the first F9 v1.1 in September 2013 - That's when the whole industry really started to pay attention - and that was still two years into the future, compared to the final events of this thread.

The politics of the time (2006-2011) were firmly - nay, strictly - aligned behind ATK, Boeing and LM ... Period.

Any proposal that didn't focus on those three was simply dead before anyone even looked at the shiny brochures. Sorry to be blunt, but that's the unvarnished truth of the political landscape at that time. The various Senators and Congress-people who were in charge of the purse strings for NASA's budget at that time wanted the program setup that way because it benefited their own districts, and thus their own reelection hopes. As a result, no project that didn't fit that model, would get even a second glance.

Ross.

This is a great explanation of the problems with presentism.  You can't judge the past by what you know now and people didn't know back then.  It doesn't matter if it was something 10 years ago or 500 years ago. People like to think they would have made better decisions even without the aid of twenty-twenty hindsight.  It doesn't work that way.

[Todd Martin]

At the time, I thought the DIRECT team to be brave, passionate engineers that fought to make a better value launcher.  Nothing has changed that opinion over the years.  What I could use help in understanding is the difference in flight rate between STS and SLS.  The budgets are similar, each STS flight needed a new core tank and 2 solids which is the same as SLS.  Would DIRECT have allowed for 6 flights a year instead of 1 every 2 years?

[aperh1988]

At the time, I thought the DIRECT team to be brave, passionate engineers that fought to make a better value launcher.  Nothing has changed that opinion over the years.  What I could use help in understanding is the difference in flight rate between STS and SLS.  The budgets are similar, each STS flight needed a new core tank and 2 solids which is the same as SLS.  Would DIRECT have allowed for 6 flights a year instead of 1 every 2 years?

The SLS core stage contains all of the legacy shuttle MPS (for 4 engines not 3) and all of the avionics boxes. The core stage is like the ET and orbiter combined, much more complex than the ET by itself. The answer to your question is no.

[Zed_Noir]

At the time, I thought the DIRECT team to be brave, passionate engineers that fought to make a better value launcher.  Nothing has changed that opinion over the years.  What I could use help in understanding is the difference in flight rate between STS and SLS.  The budgets are similar, each STS flight needed a new core tank and 2 solids which is the same as SLS.  Would DIRECT have allowed for 6 flights a year instead of 1 every 2 years?

The SLS core stage contains all of the legacy shuttle MPS (for 4 engines not 3) and all of the avionics boxes. The core stage is like the ET and orbiter combined, much more complex than the ET by itself. The answer to your question is no.

Also there is no commonality between the old ET and the SLS core in how they were manufactured. The SLS is basically a new rocket design with rebuild RS-25 engines and upgraded solid boosters.

[aperh1988]

At the time, I thought the DIRECT team to be brave, passionate engineers that fought to make a better value launcher.  Nothing has changed that opinion over the years.  What I could use help in understanding is the difference in flight rate between STS and SLS.  The budgets are similar, each STS flight needed a new core tank and 2 solids which is the same as SLS.  Would DIRECT have allowed for 6 flights a year instead of 1 every 2 years?

The SLS core stage contains all of the legacy shuttle MPS (for 4 engines not 3) and all of the avionics boxes. The core stage is like the ET and orbiter combined, much more complex than the ET by itself. The answer to your question is no.

Also there is no commonality between the old ET and the SLS core in how they were manufactured. The SLS is basically a new rocket design with rebuild RS-25 engines and upgraded solid boosters.

100% correct, although I think Todd Martin’s question really was more about DIRECT rather than SLS. My point was even if you had kept the ET design and “strapped engines to it” you still run into most of the same SLS-type issues that limit flight rate - all the avionics and MPS needs integrated  for every flight. STS avoided a huge part of this effort by reusing the orbiter. Given the same budget DIRECT probably wouldn’t have  met the same flight rate as STS.

[kraisee]

At the time, I thought the DIRECT team to be brave, passionate engineers that fought to make a better value launcher.  Nothing has changed that opinion over the years.  What I could use help in understanding is the difference in flight rate between STS and SLS.  The budgets are similar, each STS flight needed a new core tank and 2 solids which is the same as SLS.  Would DIRECT have allowed for 6 flights a year instead of 1 every 2 years?

We were always aiming for around 12-15 launches every year. 12 Exploration launches and two ISS crew/resupply missions. There could have been extras as the infrastructure was designed to support well over 20 cores every year before needing sigificant expansion. If they had followed DIRECT's plan, reusing most of what we already had with minimal modifications, we could also have afforded such a program.


A lot of SLS' additional costs originate from political decisions, but there are also technical ones.

I always thought it would have been better for Boeing to get the Orion and Altair contracts because they had more experience with such vehicles, and LM should have gotten the integration program and both stages of the Jupiter because they had so much more experience with the Shuttle's Super Light Weight Tank and with their ICES low-boiloff stage technologies.

In the event, Boeing just didn't know how to make a tank out of Al-Li 2195 and NASA threw all the existing ET tooling away to be replaced with all-new tooling to make tanks from AL-2219 instead - the same stuff the older, heavier LWT ET's had been made of. This meant a completely clean-sheet design ($$$) for a larger rocket than was actually necessary ($$$), all new tooling ($$$), all new training ($$$) all new materials ($$$), modifying Michoud to enable vertical assembly ($$$), all new J-2X engine in the critical path ($$$), all new test stand for the J-2X ($$$), major modifications to the Core stage test stand at Stennis ($$$) etc. etc. You get the idea; all of these decisions drove the costs of every single element up by quite a lot.

Add in the costs for the launch facilities - VAB modifications ($$$), all new ML ($$$), second new ML ($$$), increased propellant capacity systems ($$$) etc. Again, all driving the infrastructure costs up and up and up.

Much the same happened with the SRB's. I believe ATK has actually gotten three different big budget development contracts over the years, in support of different SLS variants. This has also driven their costs up too. ($$$)

And the SSME's also got re-work on them, and they needed to build new facilities to manufacture disposable RS-25's too. ($$$)


DIRECT had a completely different approach.

We proposed reusing all of the existing facilities far more effectively and fully. The only really new bit of manufacturing we needed was for the thrust structures on the first and second stages, plus the new payload fairing. We needed new SSME's too, which would have been a costly element, just as with SLS, but we were always aiming for much better economies of scale, which I'll come to in a minute.

Jupiter's Core Stage and Upper Stage should have been manufactured on the standard ET tooling, using LM's existing AL-Li-2195 experience and techniques - we needed so little alteration that Jupiter Cores could have been made while the final ET's were still being made for Shuttle! NASA's own 1992 NLS plans for an in-line SDLV planned to make 14 NLS cores and 9 Shuttle ET's together on the same production line every year!

The SRB's didn't need to be changed AT ALL (yes, ATK's CEO threatened to pull out if they didn't get a cushy development contract, but I would have called their bluff and threaten to just privatize the tooling as it was a national security asset - and anyway, ATK stood to make a lot of money from 12 launches x 8 segments per year = a whopping 96 segments to be processed annually!).

The VAB needed only one single existing work platform to be modified from Shuttle spec. The propellant farms at LC-39 was already perfectly adequate for DIRECT's Jupiter-246 or 241 configurations and didn't need expanding. The Shuttle MPL's could have had an extra exhaust chamber integrated and a simple launch tower like the Atlas-V's, all three MLP's could have been modified for less than the cost of building a single new ML! The testing facilities at Stennis were also adequate with only a refurbishment of the main test stand being needed - not a major redesign.

New RS-25's would still have been needed, as I mentioned earlier. But this is where economies of scale really come into play (also with all the rocket hardware, not just SSME's)...

The majority of costs to make rocket hardware is fixed. You need all the same equipment and facilities, and pretty-much the same number of engineers and technicians if you're building one product every year as you do to make 6 units, or 12 units every year. As a rule-of-thumb use a 10 to 1 ratio to get an idea of the costs involved. So say a hypothetical program has fixed infrastructure costs of $3 billion a year, the actual hardware produced is probably in the order of 1/10th of that or $300m each. That means that the first item off the production line costs $3.3 billion. But the second only costs an additional $300m for a total of $3.6bn, but splitting the costs between the total number, each now costs $1.8 billion for that year. A third costs $3.9bn total, but each now costs $1.3bn. This hopefully demonstrates why "economies of scale" are so important in this business.

By the end of the Shuttle program, including all the extra layers required post-Columbia, Shuttle's costs were in the order of $3.1bn per year with a typical flight rate around 6 per year. Shuttle's rule was actually closer to 7:1, because the winged orbiters took quite a lot more effort to maintain between flights compared to most rockets. So this suggests fixed infrastructure costs were around $1.7bn and per flight costs were around $240m per flight, resulting in each flight costing about $500m.

These economies of scale are what hurts SLS the most. One flight every year (or worse, two years!) means every flight carries the full weight of the annual fixed costs. I've seen numbers as high as $4.1 billion per SLS flight. Using the normal 10:1 rule, this suggests the SLS program's fixed costs are around $3.7bn per year, and per-flight costs are around $400m each. That's double what Shuttle used to cost! Yikes!

Since 2007, Congress has added a total of about $2 billion extra to NASA's annual budget every year to pay for SLS.  The massive costs mean that just one flight per year is already stretching NASA's budget enormously. The agency has been forced to strip the Science Directorate of most of its budget for over a decade now! There was no remaining money available to pay for the Altair lander or any lunar surface hardware either. All for a shiny new rocket. Aside from Orion, we have developed precisely NOTHING else to put on top of it.

How stupid is that, eh?

It's like building the Saturn-V and Apollo CSM, but never funding the Lunar Module. Doh! 


Anyway, with no further additional funds, NASA simply can't afford another $400m to add a second SLS launch each year, so there are zero economies of scale. That's why SLS flights cost $4.1bn each.


DIRECT would have resulted in far lower annual infrastructure costs, only slightly higher than Shuttle's. With the $2bn extra Congress gives NASA now, our launcher program would have had about $1.8bn annual fixed costs, with J-130 flight costs lower than Shuttle (no winged orbiter) of around $130m (x2) and J-246 flight costs (x12) around $170m. At our planned 14 mission flight rate, that totals about $4.1bn - the same total as SLS's annual costs, but it would have paid for 6 Lunar missions every year, one Mars mission every two years, and two J-130/Orion missions to the ISS every year, carrying about 50 tons of cargo at the same time.


Keep in mind that all of this was actually EXACTLY what the Congress purse-string-holders wanted. Their goal was always to flow MORE money to, and create MORE jobs in, their various districts. Higher costs were a GOOD thing to them. So SLS achieved precisely what they wanted and Jupiter's low-cost plan actually did not.

This was the real reason WHY things went the way they did.

I just wish we could have persuaded the Congress-folk that Jupiter, Orion, Altair, Lunar Rover, Lunar Hab and early Mars exploration would have formed a big enough PROGRAM that would have spent all the same amount of money and created all the same number of high paying space jobs in all the same districts, but would have resulted in zero "gap" after Shuttle and a far healthier US Human Space Flight Program with new Lunar Landings as early as 2015! But they always figured that lots of smaller projects were easier for NASA's enemies in Congress to cancel than one giant monolithic rocket project that was "too big to fail", even if it resulted in something a lot more embarrassing and less justifiable to everyone.

Ross.

[Emmettvonbrown]

We were always aiming for around 12-15 launches every year. 12 Exploration launches and two ISS crew/resupply missions. There could have been extras as the infrastructure was designed to support well over 20 cores every year before needing sigificant expansion.

Interesting to compare that with Shuttle flight rates. 24 a year was the revised goal, before Challenger (from "once a week", 52 per year or even 60, "one flight every six days").
They achieved 10 consecutive flights over 1985-86, ending with the disaster. According to Mike Mullane, they were heading into the wall even before STS-51L.
Post Challenger the record of flight per year was in 1996, with 8 missions.

So I presume DIRECT could do better because there was no more shuttle orbiter to refurbish ? 

[kraisee]

We were always aiming for around 12-15 launches every year. 12 Exploration launches and two ISS crew/resupply missions. There could have been extras as the infrastructure was designed to support well over 20 cores every year before needing sigificant expansion.

Interesting to compare that with Shuttle flight rates. 24 a year was the revised goal, before Challenger (from "once a week", 52 per year or even 60, "one flight every six days").
They achieved 10 consecutive flights over 1985-86, ending with the disaster. According to Mike Mullane, they were heading into the wall even before STS-51L.
Post Challenger the record of flight per year was in 1996, with 8 missions.

So I presume DIRECT could do better because there was no more shuttle orbiter to refurbish ? 

Partly, yes. The massive complexity of the Orbiter's made a huge difference to the program's costs and schedules.

DIRECT's budget plan was essentially derived from Shuttle's plus the extra ~$1.5bn that Congress allocated to exploration activities early in the Constellation effort.

We really just reallocated the same existing Shuttle costs, plus the new allocation for exploration, to pay for Jupiter's, Orion's and Altair's. We found that we could afford to fly ~14 missions each year for that amount of money.


But don't underestimate the difference that was possible if the new program had really started ACHIEVING THINGS.

I still believe that if LV-24/25 had not been overruled by Griffin in 2005, and the program had moved forwards in generally the same way DIRECT later suggested (though we would never have been needed!) we could have seen lunar crew on the surface around 2015, crew living permanently at a lunar outpost around 2018 and the first Mars missions starting around 2020 (see our schedule from 2006).

That would have been a stunning human space flight program and THAT would have created great support throughout the public and Congress - and that usually leads to increased budgets for the program, so even more flights could have been feasible.

Adjusting Gus Grissom's quote:   More bucks; more Buck Rogers.

Ross.

[JAFO]

Chuck and I are going to discuss a possible book later this week. Far too early to promise anything on that front, but we're going to talk and see where it leads us.

Obviously, we'll bring Philip and Steve in to the conversation too, but if any of the other members of DIRECT - either public or private side - would be at all interested in contributing to such an effort, please do drop me a line.

If such a project really does goes ahead, I'll mention it here on NSF.

Ross.

Any word? My credit card is ready to help crowdfund it.