The pieces are coming together for the first test flight of
NASA's new rocket, Ares I, scheduled to lift off this summer.
The rocket prototype, called Ares I-X, is scheduled to blast
off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The flight will be
unmanned, and will only include a partial first stage of the rocket, which
should lift the vehicle and mockups of its upper stage to about 25 miles (40.2
km) in roughly two minutes.
The test is a critical first try of the new Ares I rocket
for the Orion
Crew Exploration Vehicle, which NASA hopes will replace the space shuttle as
America's preeminent
spaceship. Ares I is designed to carry astronauts in the capsule-shaped
Orion vehicle that will sit atop the rocket. NASA aims to send crews aboard
Orion to the International Space Station by 2015, to the moon around 2020 and
ultimately beyond.
Ares I is being built as part of NASA's Project
Constellation, which will also include a larger sister rocket, Ares V,
designed to carry heavy cargo instead of people.
"This launch will tell us what we got right and what we
got wrong in the design and analysis phase," said Jonathan Cruz, deputy
project manager for Ares I-X Crew Module/Launch Abort System. "We have a
lot of confidence, but we need those two minutes of flight data before NASA can
continue to the next phase of rocket development."
Launch debut looms
Slated for late July or early August, the upcoming Ares I-X demonstration
launch will test whether the bottom section of the rocket, called the first
stage, burns as planned, as well as whether it can separate from a dummy upper
stage and fall back to Earth safely with
parachutes.
Engineers on the ground will monitor the flight closely
through sensors attached all over the rocket to see if the overall vehicle
design is safe and stable.
The sensors measure aerodynamic pressure and temperature at
the top of the rocket to study how it slices through the atmosphere,
determining the flow of air over the entire vehicle.
The four cylindrical segments making up Ares I-X's first stage arrived at
Kennedy Space Center March 19 from the Alliant Techsystems facility in Utah
where they were fueled.
"The team's been working many years to get to this
point," said Jon Cowart, Kennedy's deputy mission manager for Ares I-X.
"When you get the last of the hardware here, it really energizes the folks
and they begin to think this thing really could happen. It becomes that much
more real."
Some assembly required
Since arriving at the Cape, the Ares I-X segments are being
stacked inside the giant Vehicle Assembly Building. The dummy upper stages,
which are packed with weights to simulate the real thing, will be bolted onto
the top. When complete, the rocket will stand higher than 320 feet.
The launcher is planned to lift off from Kennedy's Launch
Pad 39B, which has also been used to launch both space shuttles and the Saturn
V rockets that carried Apollo capsules.
On March 25, the Mobile Launcher Platform-1, which is used
to assemble vehicles and transport them to their launch pads, was handed over
from the shuttle program to Constellation. The 4,625-ton, two-story steel structure
is now being repurposed for the Ares I-X
launch.
"It truly is a historic day to be turning over a major
piece of hardware from one manned spaceflight program to another," Shuttle
Launch Director Mike Leinbach said. "It really doesn't happen very
often."
The launcher platform has previously been used for both
shuttle and Apollo flights, including the launch of Apollo 11, which first took
humans to the moon. It is planned to retire after this summer's test flight,
having served three different space programs.
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