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"Frickin' Fantastic" Launch of NASA's Ares I-X Rocket
coondoggie writes "With a hiss and roar, NASA's Ares I-X rocket blasted into the atmosphere this morning at about 11:33 am EST, taking with it a variety of test equipment and sensors but also high hopes for the future of the US space agency. The short test flight — about 2 minutes — will provide NASA an early opportunity to look at hardware, models, facilities and ground operations associated with the mostly new Ares I launch vehicle. The mission went off without a hitch — 'frickin' fantastic' was how one NASA executive classified it on NASA TV — as the upper stage simulator and first stage separated at approximately 130,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The unpowered simulator splashed down in the ocean."
AFAIK there were a few minor hitches. One of the cameras on the first stage went out and they had trouble telling if it had splashed down or not. Also, the weather was a hassle (as it should have launched yesterday :P) and there were quite a few lightning strikes last night they'd been worried about.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I'd say something scathing and then list all the things the space program has benefited humanity and your daily life with but luckily NASA still has enough time to explain it all nicely without being condescending like I would have been:
http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home.html
Also... They have a particular section about helping humanity in general with feeding the world:
http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov/at_home/formankind.html
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The upper stage was not a real upper stage. The capsule was a mass simulator. The first stage was only a 4-segment booster with a mass simulator filling in the location of the 5th segment. This flight was about aerodynamics, control authority and a test of the 1st stage recovery parachutes.
The booster was supposed to fall into a tumble to increase drag so that it wouldn't hit the upper stage simulator (which it may have done anyway). It had rocket motors attached at the base to perform this manoeuvre and you can see these firing at separation. The upper stage simulator (USS) was unguided and little more than a lump of metal to act as the mass of the real upper stage. As such, it's not surprising that it would fall into a tumble after separation, but it seemed to do more-so than people were expecting. This is not a problem as the USS had no parachutes and landed and sank (as intended) in the Atlantic.
according to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Constellation_missions the next mission is Ares 1-Y, in 2013, a full first stage, a real second stage, testing high altitude abort.
The booster is supposed to tumble after separation, that is its design. Look at its closest twin, the Shuttle SRBs, and you will notice that they tumble immediately after they are separated.
That is by design. On the shuttle, ,illiseconds after SRB separation, 16 solid-fueled separation motors, four in the forward section of each SRB and four in the aft skirt of each SRB, are fired for just over one second to help carry the SRB's away from the rest of the Shuttle. Each of the separation motors can produce a thrust of about 22,000 pounds.
The SRB's continue to ascend in a slow, tumbling motion for about 75 seconds after SRB separation, to a maximum altitude of about 220,000 feet. The SRB's then begin to quickly fall toward the Atlantic Ocean.
The Ares SRB derivative uses a very similar system. That in mind, 1st stage tumbling is okay.
As for second stage tumbling, that was almost certainly due to being an unpowered can, for all intents and purposes. While the mockup used in today's flight has the same mass and aerodynamic shape as the real thing, it does not have thrust.
There may also have been some contact, and it is there that something could well be learned. Could be that a stronger retro motor is needed on the second stage coupled with a stronger sep motor on the 2nd. That will come out in the reports that will be filed later.
This was a test, after all, and a good one: it proved that Ares can fly. It flew quite well for some time, and it looked smoother than we may have expected. No obvious pogo-ing, for example.
oops. There are at least 3 test flights before that... a pad abort test in early 2010 and two ascent abort tests using a special booster, one in late 2010 (transonic) and one in late 2011 (max-Q).
Yes, it was designed to do that. The NASA-TV footage talked about tumble motors. By causing them to tumble, they get slowed down more by the atmosphere. They won't travel as far downrange and they'll impact the water with less speed. This will make the parts easier to recover.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wish we would back a design like Skylon. Now that would be something to get really excited about and it would fill even the general population with a sense of awe to inspire a whole new generation of space exploration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon [wikipedia.org]
Yeah sense of awe, as in WTF... the skylon is unrealistic for the following reasons:
1) Looking at the wikipedia article, first off, 50% faster than blackbird engines is a pure pipe dream. Material science has not improved enough for turbine blades to survive that, and the intakes required to decelerate incoming air to subsonic will either be too heavy, or impossible, or not distribute airflow evenly enough, etc etc. Tech and cad design help some, but not enough.
2) Second wiki article problem, twice the size (twice the wing area?) but three times the weight, that things going to be a real handful at take off.
3) The sabre engine probably will not work, as the designer himself only gives it a TRL of 2 or 3. By his own admission, that's right up there with warp drive proposals and telekinesis. The ISP is too low, the T/W is too low. Following the old 6-6-6 rule, whats wrong with 6% bigger fuel tanks and an off the shelf engine?
(The 6-6-6 rule is mach 6 (good f-ing luck) at 60Kfeet up (difficult to impossible for an air breathing engine) gets you a whopping 6% of the way to orbit)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This was a test, after all, and a good one: it proved that Ares can fly. It flew quite well for some time, and it looked smoother than we may have expected. No obvious pogo-ing, for example.
Actually it proved that a Space Shuttle SRB coupled with Atlas V avionics and a Peacekeeper missile's roll control can fly. The Ares I is actually an entirely different vehicle with almost nothing in common with what flew today, so it unfortunately doesn't answer questions with regards to things like the pogo-ing effect you describe. I'm sure it was an interesting education experience for NASA in how to design a launch vehicle, though.
Feynman's attitude wasn't "never take risks", it was "Don't take stupid risks, and don't lie to yourself about what the actual risks are".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's been quite a while since the U.S. developed a new man-rated booster. In the last decades, we have learned a LOT about spacecraft. Unfortunately, what we learned is that something like the space shuttle is nowhere as maintenance free as we thought/hoped and is fantastically more expensive.
Since we can't build a Saturn V anymore (we'd have to substitute enough obsolete parts that it would be a new design anyway) and we know building a new shuttle is too expensive, it is good to see that manned spaceflight has a future in some form in the U.S.
Ares and Orion are take two on a reusable spacecraft now that we have a better idea what parts are practical to reuse and what parts aren't.
Unlike the Soyuz rocket, Ares includes reusable components. The use of solid fueled 1st stage is expected to make it safer and easier to prep for launch. Things get more interesting once the 2nd stage is ready. It may not sound like much but the engine re-start capability is a big deal.
It's not really a step backwards so much as a lateral step away from a dead-end branch that seemed like a good idea at the time. Manned space flight isn't actually out of the experimental stage yet (and certainly wasn't when the space shuttle was designed). Sometimes progress in experimental engineering looks like a step back at first glance.