CAPE
CANAVERAL, Fla.
– NASA’s next rockets to reach towards the Moon and Mars
finally have a name: Ares.
NASA
officially unveiled the monikers Ares 1 and Ares 5 for the rockets that will
boost future astronauts and heavy cargo into space Friday, one day before the
Discovery shuttle is set
to launch into orbit.
“There
were hundreds of names,” Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate
administrator for exploration, said during the announcement here at the Kennedy
Space Center (KSC) spaceport, adding that many contenders were rejected.
“All the constellations in the sky, all the Greek and Roman gods, all
their children, cousins, it went on and on and on.”
But after
an in-house study, NASA officially settled on Ares based on the name’s
Mars-related connotations, for the two rockets of its Project Constellation
spacecraft. The first test flight an Ares booster could by 2009, with a piloted
test to follow by 2014, NASA said.
The Ares 1,
consisting of an upper stage atop a five-segmented solid rocket booster that
was originally developed for the shuttle program, will serve as NASA’s
Crew Launch Vehicle. It will launch the four-to-six astronaut (CEV) Crew Exploration
Vehicle, a 25-ton capsule-based spacecraft designed to ferry astronauts to the
ISS and Moon.
Lockheed
Martin and ajoint team from Northrop Grumman and Boeing are competing to build
the CEV for NASA, with an initial decision expected by September.
The Ares 5,
borrowing the number of NASA’s historic Saturn 5 Moon rocket, will serve
as the Cargo Launch Vehicle, and is capable of boosting a 45-ton lunar lander and a rocket stage to ferry the lander
and CEV to the Moon.
Ares 5 will
launch using two five-segment solid rocket boosters and a cluster of J-2X
engines – one of which is used in the Ares 1 upper stage – that
will be derived from the original J-2 engine used in NASA’s Apollo Moon
missions.
Jeff
Hanley, NASA’s Project Constellation program manager, said the Ares
vehicles are looking to launch from one of the two launch sites at KSC’s Pad 39 complex, though that target is very
preliminary.
NASA’s
space shuttle Discovery is currently poised atop Pad 39B for its July 1 launch.
William Gerstenmaier, NASA associated administrator for space
operations, said the Constellation program will likely borrow one of the
shuttle program’s massive crawler carriers to move Ares rockets to and
from their launch pad.
The
carriers were originally developed for the Apollo program to transport Saturn 5
rockets, and were later modified to carry the space shuttle launch stack.
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