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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."
It may really be the case that the launch was 'frickin fantastic', but just having finished reading Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age I don't put a lot of faith in what the media gets wind of with regard to space technology. This stuff is really complicated, and the general public doesn't understand that test flights going awry is not necessarily a bad thing-- so officials often put a nice veneer on the results.
I hope it really was fantastic. A lot of people put a lot of time into this thing. But this thing is so politicized, I'm not holding my breath.
Well then, please allow me to be the first to say:
"Heck yeah!"
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
I am just glad I was not riding in that simulator. Did anyone else notice the separation, and the flight path of the (in the future to be occupied) simulator? The booster and the simulator appeared to tumble after separation. It could have been the camera angle I suppose, but that front section should have continued on, correct?
They only planned to recover the first stage from what I had read. As the NASA official stated it the second stage and mock crew capsule would splash into the ocean like a giant lawn dart and sink to the bottom. I thought the analogy was funny because thanks to the government some large percentage of the population (those under say 25) have no idea what a lawn dart IS.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
Did a search for Lawn darts... best picture ever http://www.core77.com/blog/images/vanbezooyen_core77_worsttoys.jpg
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
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.
They did that by doing programmed attitude changes that put forces on the structure
I'm sorry ground control, I can't do that.
I was watching the launch with my kids on NASATV, and just when the stages separated, the leading stage started to tumble, and NASATV went black. When they came back in 20 seconds or so, they were following the larger stage on its descent.
I have to say, the supersonic vapor plume around the rocket during acceleration was awesome. I said to my kids, "look, they just broke the sound barrier," and the announcer came on with "passing Mach 1".
Very cool looking rocket, more narrow exhaust plume than I'm used to seeing, interesting angled ascent (it didn't go up straight vertically like a shuttle). We like to rag on NASA, but if this is really a an under-3-year project, who am I to cast stones?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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).
Where does the money COME FROM? Especially in a burgeoning depression? A government that produces surpluses, though it does so on the backs of the people, at least can justify some absurd pork and waste.
Not to be a downer, but cutting government spending and raising taxes to balance the budget actually worsened the 1930's Great Depression. Its the worse thing any government could do when there is a shrinkage in credit liquidity. Balanced budgets anti-inflationary measures can only be done when the economy is healthy when there is room to avoid a deflationary death cycle.
Also... NASA's budget is minuscule to some other sectors of spending:
Look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
Then look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_budget_(United_States)
Notice how NASA doesn't even show up on the pie chart of spending categories. Its less than 20 billion compared to the 500 odd so billions for medicare, social security, and defense spending a piece!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
My grandfather fell out of a tree when he was 45 years old and powdered his hip and femur. He wasn't able to walk for a year after that.
You can imagine he was pretty excited when he took his first halting step after a year of immobility.
This is sort of like the US space program.
... four years between missions? We went from nothing to the Moon in under ten years; it's taking us four years between test launches of something that we've done before?
"endless resources" to NASA. ahahahahahahahahaha. Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Even with the very tiny amount of money the US spends on its space program (compared to something like military spending or social security) the human race as a whole has benefited significantly from the things we have learned while doing it. Not just that the moon is grey and barren, or that ants still make anthills in zero gravity, but new materials, new ways to do old things, new computing, new understanding about the universe, a better understanding of the sun and outer planets and greater understanding of the building blocks of the earth itself.
It wasn't just some wasted hole that they poured money into to piss off the Russians.
Space exploration and the whole area around how to actually explore space needs much more funding than it currently has.
Oh, yes -- I'm aware of that. That's not a criticism of NASA -- it's a criticism of the United States' screwed-up way of doing things. We spend $600 billion annually on the military, and the Iraq war will cost $2.5 trillion when all is said and done ... and yet we can't give NASA enough support that they can launch more than once every four years?
My nation is pathetic.
Great. First we bomb the moon, looking for water. Then we bomb the Atlantic Ocean. Were we looking for Moons?
Gliding back to land is not a big deal, the biggest problem with the Shuttle is the false economy of having the main engines be re-usable. This means main engines are attached to the shuttle itself, which means the vehicle has to be mounted on the side of all that dangerous crap. If the main engines were one-use then the crew and orbiter could be on the very top of the assembly, safe from any fuel tank or SRB shenanigans. Furthermore, you could have a crew rescue rocket like the Apollo assembly had.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Some items to note:
(I largely copied this from a comment I made yesterday, but it still seems pertinent)
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!
"Space is a frontier for our great-grandchildren to consider"
We will always have the poor.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
September 12, 1962. President John F. Kennedy says "We choose to go to the Moon". Nine years later Alan Shepard is playing gold at Fra Mauro.
Fast forward to 2009, when President Barry Obama says "Well, I guess you can go to the Moon, but I can't pay for it. Maybe you could go to an asteroid or play some chess instead." NASA starts looking for loose change in the couch to finance the next test launch.
"So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this state of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space."
...just not today, so maybe we should wait and rest and look behind us for a while, until that darn economy fixes itself.
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
NASA has always been "another government bureaucracy". The difference between the 60's and now: in the 60's, we had 1) a clear goal to aim for, and 2) sufficient funding to achieve the goal. In recent years we've had neither of these things... and that's not NASA's fault, it's the fault of Congress and the President.
And regarding the space elevator: the laughter has died down, and been replaced with... nothing. That's because there's nothing to talk about. We still don't have the technology to produce carbon nanofibers in anything like the lengths that would be required to build it. Nor do we know if other technical obstacles to building one can be overcome. Nor do we have even the slightest idea what it would cost (and won't until we solve the first two issues). And if you don't know the cost, you can't evaluate whether it's more cost effective than just using rockets. All of which means there's no basis to proceed with a project.
your user name is remarkably appropriate
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.
I remember making our own (though I was born in '81 so I could have gotten my hands on the real thing). My grandfather kept chickens, ducks, and geese as farm animals, and there were always some feathers laying around the yard (I think - I'm hoping that my cousins weren't just pulling the feathers where they could get them :)).
Anyways, we'd take a bundle of feathers and push them through a large heavy hex-nut. The hex-nut gave it enough weight to throw and come down with force, and the feathers stabilized the flight and made for a good tip when coming down :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
$17B a year is not going to make a dent in the economy or in poverty or homelessness, or climate change or anything else. Those are the results of human nature and/or normal cycles, and fixing them is a matter of political will and good policy, not a few extra dollars.
Spending a small amount on space exploration is EXACTLY what the government exists to do -- do things that require large amounts of money (for an individual or group) with high risks and low immediate reward, but that have the potential for great reward for all of society.
And if you think $17B a year with increases less than inflation and ever new directives and goals are 'endless resources' I think you need to take a look at the scale of the federal budget.
Would it be harder to take something like an Atlas 5 (that's got literally hundreds of flights under its belt) and modify it for human space flight then to build a completely new rocket (granted taking bits from lots of different rockets)?
It's technically more straightforward and easier, but politically about an order of magnitude more difficult. Using commercial vehicles like the Atlas V is covered in section 5.3.3 of the report. They estimated 3-5 years for a provider to achieve orbital crew capability. They also estimated a cost of $300 million - $1.5 billion per provider, so if they had contracts with three competing providers initially and one of them droppped out, that would be a total cost to NASA of $2-$2.5 billion. For comparison, NASA's current estimated development cost for Ares I+Orion is $35-$45 billion.
is a way to shoot lawn darts from a gun.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .