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Ares 1-X Ready On Pad, Launch Set For 1200 GMT
DynaSoar writes "NASA's new Ares I-X rocket is undergoing final preparations for its planned launch test Tuesday, October 27. Launch time is scheduled for 8 AM EDT (1200 GMT). As of noon Monday it appeared that there was a 60% chance of showers and/or high altitude clouds interfering. However, the launch has a an eight hour window of opportunity through 2000 GMT, and would require only 10 minutes of clear skies within that time to fly. Of interest to engineering types, both those who favor the new vehicle's design and its critics, will be to see whether the predicted linear 'pogo stick' oscillation will occur, and whether the dampening design built into it prevents damaging and possibly destructive shaking. Extensive coverage is being presented by Space.com; for NASA TV streaming video, schedules and downlink information, visit nasa.gov/ntv." Update 15:37 GMT by timothy: The weather did not cooperate; today's planned launch has been scrubbed.
As long as they are good....
Query: are rockets spaceships and if so are they female like normal ships? They've always seemed a bit to... phallic and gaseous to be female.
As a demonstration of US technical prowess, Ares I is pathetic; its got similar capabilities to Saturn I and took much longer to develop. It anything its a demonstration of US decline...
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
As a demonstration of US technical prowess, Ares I is pathetic; its got similar capabilities to Saturn I and took much longer to develop. It anything its a demonstration of US decline...
I agree. NASA's budget is spiralling downwards, and they can barely keep the shuttle going. The Ares programme isn't even sure to be completed (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,459465,00.html).
I'm watching the stream now of them assembling the Ares and I must say the VAB is the most impressive building I've ever seen. I got to tour the inside (way back in the early 90s) and the amount of empty space available, inside a building that can withstand hurricane force winds. It is truly mind-boggling.
NasaTV Feeds at different resolutions:
100k/s, 320/240
200k/s, 320/240
500k/s, 480x360(I think)
1200k/s, 640/480
All Windows Media format
Real media format
Quicktime
Launch data
What is going to happen with the Ares V? I heard rumors about it being scrapped. I hope they were wrong?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Sadly I suspect that the one thing that would really get NASA and ESA some serious funding would be if say, Pakistan, India and China all started attempts at building military space stations, especially China since they have the resources coupled with a "Just get it up there right now!" attitude similar to that of the soviets.
It's not so easy to sit back and relax when some other guy decides that you can just train more astronauts if a few die if it means you get there first.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I'm combining your
10 trillion of printed from nothing US $dollars
with
who just transfer the trillions to Europe
And I have to wonder: Don't those two issues cancel out?
This 'new' rocket is basically a solid booster from the space shuttle, that needs to be extended with a 5th segment, but it now flies with a 5th dummy segment. On top of that is more dummy weight. This is just a test of an existing and older booster. Now why do you think there is some kind of competition in rocketry that the US can be number one in? Or are you just happy you or your parents paid taxes for this upcoming show?
Or am I a 'hater' because I a a little sceptic about this project of NASA because you cannot understand discourse? Personally, I am much more impressed with SpaceX and Armadillo, who seem to come up with nice projects for much less money. Wasn't there a new SpaceX big rocket on the launchpad soon?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
A cylindrical structure is subject to unstable wake flows, where small asymmetries in the flows around the structure lead to alternating vortices behind it. This is commonly termed vortex shedding, and leads to substantial lateral loads which vary fairly quickly and may cause resonance problems in the structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_shedding. That's why tall smokestacks nowadays usually have corkscrew fins - to deliberately introduce turbulence, so that the load is less variable and resonant load frequencies have negligible amplitudes.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Didn't work when the Russians had Salute's 5, 6, 7 and Mir or were you asleep during the last 50 years?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Fox News is now slashdots #1 news source? :(
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
The vibrations that are commonly called 'pogo' in big rockets are caused by a feedback / resonance of thrust oscillations with inlet pressure of the turbopumps, see this extensive discussion. Pogo is fixed by adding dampers to the propellant lines. Ares I, like every big solid, has combustion instabilities that cause thrust oscillations, but there's no feedback like in a liquid rocket. Only danger is hitting one of the structural resonances and ringing the rocket like a bell (and possibly causing the structure to 'diverge').
Sorry, but your "lolz" make you unqualified to comment on any serious matter and be taken seriously.
Didn't work when the Russians had Salute's 5, 6, 7 and Mir or were you asleep during the last 50 years?
I haven't been alive for 50 years, you insensitive clod!
SSC
Why is NASA so bent on using the solid-fuel boosters, when the military already has the much cheaper Delta iV Heavy and Atlas V rockets that have been proven?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
I am hard-pressed to think of any great advances in knowledge that were not already known from by the time the cruddy but long-surviving MIR burned up in the atmosphere.
I hate it when people like you pull the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately schtick. Listen, just because you can't think of anything doesn't mean there isn't useful science coming out of NASA EVERY DAY.
You should look at the NASA Spinoff page. http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/
NASA is pushing the state of the art in materials, robotics, communications, structural engineering, environment and many others. Things that have real-world impact on our lives today. It's not just Tang and Velcro.
The ISS, despite all it's flaws and short comings, gives us lessons every day in how to survive and thrive in the harshest of all environments. It will give us the technology and know-how to do longer range and longer duration missions than were ever before possible.
I agree that in the long term space travel will be deemed very important. However, that does not create the funds to pay for it. You sidestepped my point, which is that we cannot afford it.
You answered your own question - in the long term it will be very important. Try reading up on some of the mission objectives and payloads before you categorically deny that no "great innovations" have resulted. Long-term missions and space habitability experience cannot be solved on paper.
Though I have always adored the thought and reality of space travel--this is just a luxury we cannot afford now. There is no pressing problem that would cause this need to travel to the Moon or Mars to occur.
No, actually, space exploration is essentailly done on the bubble-gum budget of the US. Deleting NASA or doubling NASA would have no noticible effect on the US budget-- the funding level is down in the noise compared to the main budget items.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This logic just pisses me off right now. NASA is asking for an extra $3 billion per year to build a new viable replacement to the space shuttle. When you contrast the other things the gov't is wastefully spending its money on its ridiculous.
You could fund NASA the extra $3 billion for
10 years instead of bailing out GM and Chrysler
or
Nearly 57 years instead of bailing out f-ing AIG
THAT is government waste. Spending for NASA has always provided benefits for science and impacted our daily lives. Its a worthy endeavor and something necessary to IMHO spur on the advancement of the human race.
Politicians make a great noise about "science and engineering" being important to this country. Lets see them back up those words. If NASA's new rockets die on the vine the politicians will have shown their true beliefs on this issue. If this nation fails to renew its capability for manned spaceflight, in my opinion, we will also distinctly show that to America, science and engineering don't matter anymore. Why not become a doctor or lawyer, oh wait, the doctors are going to get screwed by health care reform, so why not just become a lawyer if you want to be successful. This country no longer rewards those that build and design great things anymore, the money game and the ever growing soulless corporations get quite literally TRILLIONS of dollars in support from the government, and one of the biggest science and engineering problems we are trying to solve right now gets told "sorry theres not enough left for you". Its utter bullshit.
Sure our government doesn't really have enough money right now, but not because of NASAs budget issues, it because they've been handing it out like f-ing candy to assholes on Wall Street who f-cked the country over and went laughing all the way to the bank(err government). We need to get all that money back (or at least stop giving it away) and start spending it on the RIGHT things.
We can afford it fine, its just we keep spending the money on military misadventures or corporate bailouts. If we used your logic for funding it, we'd never have a space program, as we would endlessly be spending money on whatever crisis or crapshoot interests us, and not bother with space tech till its too late.
Just announced cargo ship in the range will need up to 90 min to clear the area.
Considering the banks here in the UK alone received £1 trillion, the amount spent on a space program is a drop in the ocean and is frankly spent in a far more responsible manner (rather than give greedy sociopathic bankers massive bonuses despite the fact they fucked us all).
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
It's about bloody time they got this thing started
Actually, it's past time.
Free Martian Whores!
Once you stop the wheel, it takes a lot to get it to start turning again.
Aerospace engineering expertise exists in the engineers that live/work/breathe/teach their profession. If you temporarily cancel a program, all of those engineers will have to find work elsewhere and all of their knowledge that is stored in their heads will be lost.
Tell me, as an engineer who recently graduated, why I should even go into aerospace engineering if I have to deal with the opinions of people like you who would rather we not spend money on such frivolous activities. Instead we are so broke we need to allocate a few billion for national health care or for bailing out wall street. Why would any student go into aerospace engineering in the kind of an environment where they don't even have a potential job.
You claim we have more pressing problems to solve like clean energy etc, but you don't realize that just throwing more people at the problem isn't going to necessarily solve it. Those engineers might want to design rockets instead of fuel cells yah know.
You are now saying that space exploration is "wrong."
That's a different argument. You are entitled to your opinion.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'd like to discuss this more, but we're out of time, so we'll have to leave it there.
I guess NASA is not big enough to fail. I wonder how the banks are going to behave now they know they are to big to fail and have been rewarded for their risky behavior. I mean you wouldn't expect them just to do the same things again only worse?
It's actually looking pretty bleak for America's space program - in terms of funding, political support and public interest, unfortunately. I think the people actually interested in a space program are, well, here or working at nasa, and some of them are here too. It's sad because it really indicates that Joe public has basically given up on space exploration and has no imagination left.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Can you imagine the lateral stress on the structure if you attempted to build it horizontally and then hoist?
Ask the Russians, that's how they rig the Soyuz rockets. Been doing it pretty successfully for 40 years or so now.
Nothing would speed our journey to becoming a has-been superpower faster than the cessation of government funding for scientific research. Especially critical is government funding of pure research: that is, research that has no immediate and obvious commercial benefit. Even if you think that space exploration/research is a luxury you should argue for doing as much of it as possible to keep our science on the cutting (leading) edge.
Of course, if you think that space is a luxury with no benefit then you are, simply, either woefully underinformed or an idiot. Weather satellites, NASA's projects have directly led to the creation of dozens of industries that have revolutionized the world. http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/spinoff.html
Science is what catapulted us to being the dominate superpower. Applied science is money today, pure science is money tomorrow. We can't afford to cut any of it.
Launch scrub for today due to weather.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
"stop global Climate Change"
Only case I can make for manned space flight is for when the fossil fuels lobbies in the U.S. or China kill any effective caps on carbon emissions, we eventually hit a tipping point in CO2 levels and the runaway green house effect starts. Then there would be a compelling case for having a colony on Mars to keep our species alive when we make Earth uninhabitable. Of course as badly as our species is botching this planet not sure we deserve the reprieve. Its become pretty clear the intense greed in our species is a fatal flaw in our evolutionary development that needs to be eliminated by natural selection. Greed is a desirable trait for motivation but its become clear in our species it drives people to indulge in pathological behavior with complete disregard for the long term consquences of short term gains. Let's just hope that enough other species survive that evolution can start over on Earth, and in a few hundred million years plants will have sequestered enough CO2 to return the planet to stability and new intelligent life forms develop that don't suck as bad as homo sapiens.
The only other rationale for manned space exploration is it does restore a sense of adventure and frontiers to conqueror which is something our species has always had until the last century, and life is a little bleak when we become rutted as a species. There are no longer any frontiers on this planet with the possible exception of the deep oceans. Of course NASA in particular has turned the manned space program in to such a complete yawner no one believes they will break through any frontiers if you did give them the funding. Robotic spacecraft are the only ones breaking frontiers at this point so they deserve the money until you are going to commit to colonizing Mars.
@de_machina
For example: spending $500 billion dollars to find a cure for cancer will be very important.
Will it be, really? People will continue to die by the thousands every year. And then we will have the same cry: We must stop (whatever becomes the new cause of death) before we can think about space. People are supposed to die, and a lot younger than we currently do. Eliminate the big causes of death and you *increase* the load on the planet's resources. And why cancer? Only *one* cancer (lungs) is in the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
And what happens when 20 years from now we now we realize that the climate change won't stop. Climates *always* change, and not always into a form that is comfortable for us. The idea that we can freeze the climate in a configuration that we like is the ultimate in hubris. You can slow it, you can try to minimize the change, but you can't stop it "in its tracks". So what happens when we realize the planet will continue to change and we have nowhere else to turn because we've been ignoring space all this time?
Any economist will tell you: running four programs concurrently at 25% of max capacity is more efficient than running one at 100% and retooling between each. Money is always tight, but if you *stop* a program, more times than not it never gets restarted.
NASA's budgets is approx. 0.5% of GDP. If you want to find money, look at the big money sinks. Which is more feasible: killing NASA or finding a way to reduce defense spending by 2.75%? They both free up the same amount of money.
As a demonstration of US technical prowess, Ares I is pathetic; its got similar capabilities to Saturn I and took much longer to develop. It anything its a demonstration of US decline...
Since you are comparing launch vehicles rather than stage 1 boosters, I'll take it you mean Saturn C-1 which had the Saturn 1 first stage. It was the first of the Saturn family to fly. For comparison purposes we'll use that vs. the Ares 1-X CLV presently sitting on Pad 39B
Capabilities:
Saturn C-1: 19,800 lbs to LEO
Ares: 54,000 lbs to LEO
Development (proposal to first launch)
Saturn: 'Proposal for a National Integrated Missile and Space Vehicle Development Plan'; Werner von Braun 30 DEC 1957, to 27 OCT 1961 = ~46 months
Ares CLV: Initial design proposed September 2005 to (not yet flown but on pad 4 days ahead of schedule and awaiting a clear launch window) now = ~49 months
The 6.5% longer Ares development time is insignificant considering the August 2006 redesign from proven 4 segment SRB booster + shuttle main engine sustainer to untried 5 segment
SRB derivative + J-2S sustainer. The C1 didn't change significantly during development from the originally proposed cluster of Redstone airframes/tanks and engines.
As an aside, if the parent was posted with prior knowledge of these facts, the post itself the being purposefully false with the intent to instigate otherwise unnecessary replies, it would be a 'troll'. If the parent was posted in ignorance of the facts but simply intended to initiate arguments, it would be 'flamebait'. Intentionally or not, parent is quite the opposite of 'informative'. Sadly we do not have a '-1 misinformative' mod.
I'll not speculate on your intentions or on your possible state of ignorance/intellectual impairment, as time will produce a result more definitive than my mere opinion. I will note that like both the dummy payload carrying Saturn C1 and Ares 1-X, you appear to be capable of accomplishing little more than blowing a lot of smoke out of your ass.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Ares 1-X has no capability to LEO at all as it is a sub-orbital rocket, like the first Saturn I flight. Furthermore, you place the start of the Saturn I design (beyond 'we need a dedicated launcher') about a year too early. So don't presume to lecture me on facts.
The Ares team has a number of advantages over the Saturn team:
1. The first stage of Ares 1-X is already in service as the Shuttle SRB
2. The second stage engine of Ares 1 (which isn't even ready for use as such yet) is a tried and tested design
3. Computer technology has come along astronomically since then; the Saturn team didn't even have access to microprocessors.
The inescapable fact is, that the Ares development next to the Saturn development shows serious structural problems in NASA, and perhaps in the science and engineering culture of the US as a whole (which NASA is almost indisputably at the forefront of).
You have one or two facts, rather than an in-depth knowledge, and you have fitted them into a narrative you find pleasing (US still no. 1! Woo!) and think this makes you intelligent. You are wrong, what you are displaying here is cargo-cult rocket science. You've seen how smart people post and you are trying to imitate it.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Some items to note:
There are a lot of steps between Ares 1-X, and an actual Ares 1 + Orion that can take people to orbit. Augustine and crew say 2017 before that happens, and they seem to have a good idea of what they're talking about.
Whats on the pad now is largely a publicity stunt -- especially with the future of Ares 1 itself in doubt. Its a 4-segment SRB with a dummy 5th segment, and a dummy second stage and Orion capsule. The fact that the SRB is different means it doesn't represent the vibrations and harmonics of the actual vehicle well. The upper parts are still under development as well.
Of course, its not a worthless test. Its ridiculously well instrumented, thus why weather matters even though its a suborbital lob, and it has also been modeled extensively. Being able to compare models to actual data on this scale is quite valuable. Probably not worth the $450M this launch will cost in total, but probably worth the remaining cost in the recent decisions to go ahead and continue the launch even with Ares 1 in doubt.