NASA's Ares 1-X Rocket: Space Shuttle Replacement?

Houston, Oct. 26, 2009 — -- This isn't your daddy's space ship -- but it is something your grandfather might recognize. The Ares 1-X rocket sitting on the launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center is ready to go, scheduled for launch Tuesday morning if the weather holds.

It won't go far on this trip, but NASA hopes it will eventually take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit and -- someday -- on to Mars.

This launch follows a less-than-wholehearted endorsement by the Augustine Commission, the presidential panel that spent this past year reviewing the future of the U.S. space program.

The Ares is supposed to replace the 30-year-old space shuttle, which is scheduled to quit flying by the end of 2011 after six more missions. Ares, the commission concluded, will cost too much and take too long to really be a practical replacement. The plan was to have it ready to fly by 2015, but 2017 is more realistic. NASA's only option, meanwhile, to get astronauts to the space station is to buy seats on the Russian Soyuz.

That said, Norm Augustine, chairman of the Human Spaceflight Commission, did recommend the $445 million Ares 1-X test flight go as scheduled to generate valuable test data.

"We think there are important things to be learned that will help the program," he said last week.

This slender rocket, built with some used and some new space shuttle parts, has a design that harkens back to the Apollo program -- a capsule on top of a rocket powered by solid rocket fuel. This new-generation program is called Constellation, and Jeff Hanley is the man in charge.

"Physics hasn't changed much (since Apollo); it still takes big rockets to do these big missions," said Hanley. "The Ares V that we are planning to build has much in common with the Ares 1, the crew launch vehicle".

Ares gets its big two-minute test this week. This is actually a limited experiment: the rocket has a dummy upper stage, and does not carry the Orion space capsule meant eventually to carry astronauts. The Ares is to head due east after launch, rising 150,000 feet over the Atlantic and reaching a speed of four times the speed of sound.

Then the rocket will plunge into the ocean. It carries 700 sensors to feed data which engineers will use to check the Ares' design.