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Ares rocket passes milestone amid growing uncertainty
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW

Posted: August 14, 2009


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Engineers added the final piece to NASA's skyscraping Ares 1 test rocket overnight Thursday, topping off the 327-foot-tall demo booster as senior White House officials deliberate whether the agency's moonbound program is still viable.


The Orion spacecraft and launch abort system simulators are lifted inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis
 
Launch of the slender white rocket on a test flight dubbed Ares 1-X is scheduled for Oct. 31, but engineers continue to battle concerns with vibrations that could damage critical systems inside the vehicle, according to Jon Cowart, deputy mission manager at Kennedy Space Center.

The final segment of the rocket was lifted by a heavy-duty crane and a handling device nicknamed the "birdcage," Cowart said.

Called Super Stack 5, the top end of the rocket includes a simulated Orion spacecraft and a mock needle-like launch abort system.

At more than 30 stories, the rocket's height eclipses the space shuttle and is the tallest vehicle housed inside NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building since the Saturn 5 super-booster of the Apollo program more than three decades ago.

"They set it down with a piece of handling equipment we use that we colloquially call the birdcage. When you saw them lift that over the launch abort system in order to get it off...you get an idea how really big this thing is," Cowart said.

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The milestone capped nearly a year of integration work inside the cavernous building. Final assembly of the rocket began July 8 in the VAB's northeastern high bay.

"It's been less than three years from concept to being fully stacked, and I don't know within the history of NASA that we've done something quite like that," Cowart said.

The early Ares 1-X test was conceived to provide designers important data about the flight characteristics of NASA's next human-carrying launcher, the Ares 1.

The Ares 1-X rocket is powered by a stock four-segment solid rocket booster borrowed from the shuttle program. A dummy fifth segment, second stage and spacecraft are all inert, but match the real Ares 1's exact aerodynamic profile.

But the Ares 1 program could be in jeopardy after an independent presidential panel found NASA's plans to return to the moon by the 2020s is impossible given current budget projections.

The Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee, chaired by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, was to meet with senior NASA and White House officials Friday to discuss the board's preliminary findings.

In a public hearing Wednesday, the independent committee members presented several options for future American human space endeavors, including NASA's Constellation program that uses the Ares 1 rocket.

An external analysis of President Obama's fiscal year 2010 budget request shows the Constellation program, as it is now envisioned, will not fit within NASA's funding forecasts.

The commission also studied several alternatives for deep space exploration, but experts could not find a credible case under the government's projected space program budget.

"Our view is that it will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in the human spaceflight area," Augustine said Wednesday.

Officials leading the Ares 1-X project say they are following the panel's work, but are trying to keep workers focused on preparing for the launch.

"NASA's work continues according to the most recent direction it has been given by the administration," an agency spokesperson said.

Cowart described the revelations as a "mild distraction" but stressed the team's commitment to Ares 1-X.

"We can't focus on that because if we do, we would be changing course every day," Cowart said.

"Someone way above our pay grade can shut us down at their discretion, but we've got no direction or indication that we are not going to fly this rocket," Cowart said.

 
The fully stacked Ares 1-X rocket stands inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Credit: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis
 
Engineers are still analyzing vibrations the Ares 1-X rocket could experience during its two-minute flight.

Officials originally identified problem areas within the upper stage simulator, the flight termination system and first stage steering system.

Cowart said technicians are stiffening brackets inside the simulated upper stage to resolve concerns there. But engineers are still studying mitigation options for the critical flight termination system and hydraulic thrust vector control unit.

The Air Force would use the flight termination system to destroy the rocket if it flew off course and threatened populated areas.

"We don't have the final answers yet," Cowart said. "Each time we go through an iteration of this, it gets better, but we're still not down to having all of our factors of safety that we want to have."

Managers elected to finish stacking the vehicle in parallel with the engineering work, and Cowart said repairs that would require taking the rocket apart again are "highly unlikely."

"If we got to the point where a destack was required, that is probably going to be, schedule-wise, the least of our concerns because the redesign we would have to do would certainly encompass any destack," Cowart said.

Engineers will attach mechanical shakers to the rocket in the next few weeks to induce vibrations on the rocket and gauge its response.

"That will tell us a lot about the stiffness of the rocket as well as how stiff the bolted and pinned joints are," Cowart said.

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More instrumentation tests are also on tap, then officials will power up the new rocket for the first time by the end of August.

"Doing that first power up, wringing out the whole system, checkout the navigation and control systems, that is going to take a good six weeks right there," Cowart said.

Although the schedule for Ares 1-X's Oct. 31 launch date has several weeks of slack time, the testing could hit more snags during powered checks.

"That's our next really big opportunity to find a big problem," Cowart said.

NASA is also modifying launch pad 39B to receive the booster in the final days before liftoff.

Most changes have already been completed, and the final major addition will arrive in the middle of September when a new vehicle stabilization arm is attached to the complex's 255-foot level.

In the meantime, the Obama administration is expected to vet the findings and options proposed by the Augustine panel. There is no word on when a decision will be announced.

"So we'll keep pressing on, we will do our best, we'll make the rocket fly and if the direction that we're going to take for the Constellation program goes in a different way, it's not because of anything we didn't do," Cowart said.