page_title: DIRECT
section_title: Integrated Approach - reuse existing facilities
hierarchical_section_title: DIRECT / Integrated Approach - reuse existing facilities
caption_attribution_description: English: The redesigned external fuel tank, designated ET-118, that will launch Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-115 is offloaded from the Pegasus barge that carried it from the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The tank will be moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building and lifted into a checkout cell for further work. It will fly with many major safety changes, including the removal of the protuberance air load ramps.
context_page_description: DIRECT was a late-2000s proposed alternative super heavy lift launch vehicle architecture supporting NASA's Vision for Space Exploration that would replace the space agency's planned Ares I and Ares V rockets with a family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles named "Jupiter".
  DIRECT was advocated by a group of space enthusiasts who asserted that they represented a broader team of dozens of NASA and space industry engineers who actively worked on the proposal on an anonymous, voluntary basis in their spare time. In September 2008, the DIRECT Team was said to consist of 69 members, 62 of whom were NASA engineers, NASA-contractor engineers, and managers from the Constellation Program. The small number of non-NASA members of the team publicly represented the group.
  The project name "DIRECT" referred to a philosophy of maximizing the re-use of hardware and facilities already in place for the Space Shuttle program, hence a "direct" transition.
context_section_description: According to the DIRECT team, many NASA engineers and managers supported the concept and completed a cost analysis comparison with NASA's current Constellation program and a detailed series of evaluations for supporting facilities such as data on the existing manufacturing facilities for the External Tank at the Michoud Assembly Facility and the various launch-processing facilities currently at the Kennedy Space Center.  DIRECT proposed to re-use nearly all of the existing facilities with minimal modifications in contrast to the Ares I and Ares V rockets which would have required extensive modifications and replacements over existing facilities.
  The DIRECT's core stage would have remained at the existing 8.41 m (27.6 ft) diameter of the Shuttle's External Tank compared to 10.06 m (33.0 ft) for Ares V.  The DIRECT team claimed that by not increasing the core stage diameter the existing External Tank manufacturing tooling at the Michoud Assembly Facility, the existing Pegasus barge used to transport the tank from Michoud to Kennedy Space Center, the existing work platforms in the Vehicle Assembly Building, the existing Mobile Launcher Platforms and Crawler-Transporters, and parts of the structure of the existing Fixed Service Structure and Flame Trenches at Launch Complex 39 could be used without major modifications.
  The Space Launch System, NASA's eventual successor to Ares, retained the Space Shuttle tankage diameter of 8.41 m (27.6 ft).
caption: Pegasus barge delivers a Space Shuttle External Tank to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida from the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana. DIRECT would use the existing barge to transport its planned similar tank from Michoud.
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