The rocket slated
to launch NASA's new manned spaceship on missions to Earth orbit and ultimately
the moon passed a milestone review late Wednesday, space agency officials said.
A panel of
24 engineers signed off on the preliminary design review of NASA's Ares I
rocket, the two-stage booster for the agency's space shuttle replacement - the Orion
Crew Exploration Vehicle. NASA hopes to launch the first manned tests of rocket
in 2014, four years after its space shuttle fleet retires.
"It's a big
day," said Doug Cooke, NASA's deputy administrator for exploration systems, told
reporters after the review. "It is an important milestone in the exploration
effort."
Not since
1973, when engineers took an early look at the agency's space shuttle plan, has
NASA performed a preliminary design review for a rocket intended to launch
astronauts into space.
"We poked
and prodded ourselves pretty good today," said Steve Cook, manager of NASA's
Ares project at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Cook and
his team plan to hold a separate review next summer to revisit plans to add
shock absorbers to the Ares I aimed at dampening excessive vibrations
during launch. A final integrated review of the entire rocket is scheduled for
March 2011.
Jeff
Hanley, manager of NASA's Constellation program overseeing Orion and Ares
rocket development, said the review process for the Orion capsules has been
delayed from November of this year to some time in 2009 due to funding issues. Funding
challenges also forced NASA to push back its
internal target for the first crewed Orion launches from 2013 to 2014 last
month.
"We've gone
through a redo of the budget and scheduled and moved the program schedule,"
Hanley said. The first unmanned test of the Ares rocket, the Ares I-X launch,
is now slated to fly in June 2009 after being delayed from April of that year,
he added.
NASA's
Constellation program currently expects to spend about $3 billion a year for
Orion and Ares development through 2010, Hanley said.
Under NASA's
current vision, Orion is slated to begin
operational flights no later than 2015 to ferry six astronauts to the
International Space Station, with four-astronaut teams due to make the next
moon shots by 2020. A separate heavy lift rocket, the Ares V, would carry other
cargo and the lunar lander for moon missions.
The Ares
I rocket's first stage consists of a five-segment solid rocket booster
similar to the four-segment ones used to launch space shuttles today. The upper
stage is powered by a liquid propellant-fueled J-2X main engine derived from
the engines that lofted NASA's Saturn 1B and Saturn V boosters during the
Apollo program.
"This is
where we really wrapped the entire vehicle together and make sure that we've
got a sound design from stem to stern," Cook told reporters. "It's really a big
step in our journey to launch."
Cook said
that 10 percent of the questions raised during today's Ares I review are still
pending resolution, including issues surrounding the separation of the rocket's
two stages, noise related to the booster's flight through Earth's atmosphere
and what types of weather to harden the vehicle against during ascent.
"We'd like
to be able to fly though some clouds," Cook said, adding that his team needs to
determine if Ares I will have to deal with hail or other weather. "And as well,
lightning. Do we need to take a direct lightning strike?"
The goal,
he added, is to have a rocket a bit hardier than NASA's current three-shuttle
fleet.
"We're
going to have a much more robust vehicle than the orbiter," Cook said.
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