NASA Announces Approved Designs for Ares I Rocket
The Marshal Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, announced the winning designs for the new Ares I crew launch rocket had been approved by the agency. According to the press release, “The system requirements review confirmed that the Ares I system requirements were complete, validated and responsive to mission requirements.”
What that means is that designers and engineers are now ready to proceed with the nuts and bolts engineering to make the Ares a reality, now that they’ve determined it can accomplish what the project requires. Along the way there will be several such reviews to make sure the rockets, including the Ares I, IV and V, will all meet the strictest safety tolerances possible and remain on track to fulfil the mission requirements.
Changes that are now part of the baseline plan include a common bulk head for the oxygen and hydrogen storage tanks, the 5-stage thrust profile of the Ares I during ascent and the height of the vehicle.
The project will now focus on refining these designs and testing existing components. This is one of the advantages of creating a rocket design that uses pieces of other designs. Test engineers already know how each component is supposed to behave. The challenge now is to put them together in a synergistic manner.
Even the relatively petite Ares I design, affectionately called “the stick” by some, is still massive compared to the Space Shuttle. Both the cargo and crew delivery systems, when fully assembled are just as tall as the Saturn V rockets that delivered the Apollo missions. In a modern twist, several components of the ships including the Orion crew vechile and the first stage of the Ares I are reusable, on paper at least.
The MSFC is responsible for designing and developing both the Ares I crew launch vehicle and the economy-sized Ares V cargo lanch vehicle.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:02 am and is filed under The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 1st, 2007 at 12:19 pm
[...] More information will no doubt be forthcoming when the submitted designs pass their first review, as Ares I did recently. Written by JP Schoeffel You Like It? : Share It! These icons link to social bookmarking sites [...]