Testing of the Ares I Continues–Part II
“It’s appropriate that we named these vehicles Ares, which is a pseudonym for Mars,” said Scott Horowitz, associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Washington. “We honor the past with the number designations and salute the future with a name that resonates with NASA’s exploration mission.”
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When the next generation of launch vehicles was named by NASA, it was for spacecraft that would return our astronauts not only to the moon, but also to take them to Mars and other areas of the solar system. With the crew vehicle called Ares I, and the cargo launch vehicle to be called Ares V, NASA paid homage to the Apollo programs of Saturn I and Saturn V rockets—their very first large U.S. space vehicles conceived and developed for human spaceflight alone.The Ares I can lift more than 55,000 pounds from Earth to low Earth orbit, utilizing a set of thrusters that will be aligned to turn the Ares I stack, right after take-off, to line the rocket up where it will be going to. This is the very same thruster system used by the Air Force’s Peacekeeper missile fleet, using part of a decommissioned Peacekeeper as stand-ins during the testing for the Ares I parts.
The Peacekeeper, credited with helping end the Cold War, was the most powerful, accurate missile that was ever deployed, according to Lt. Col. David Bliesner, 400th Missile Squadron commander at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Its missile system development began in 1979, with the final phase of its deactivation process on September 19, 2005. Capable of carrying up to 10 independently targeted nuclear warheads, the Peacekeeper was designed to strengthen the “ground-based strategic policy of the United States”.
At a cost of $70 million at that time with 50 missiles fully operational under the control of the 400th DS, its deactivation was estimated to save the Air Force more than $600 million through 2010. “There are certainly conflicting emotions associated with deactivation of Peacekeeper and the 400th Missile Squadron,” Colonel Bliesner said. “Thinking about it on a national and global level, anytime we can reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, it is certainly the best thing to do.”
With this kind of background, it is no wonder the Ares I has such high expectations from its engineers and scientists. A team looking forward to this coming September for the testing of its flight components, they are quoted as saying, “We learned to make some adjustments on our ground support equipment,” said NASA’s David Tomasic, a fluid systems engineer at Kennedy. “Everything worked pretty much flawlessly.”
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 2:55 am and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns, 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.
