"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."

Uh huh

[raddan]

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 [amazon.com] 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.

Test flight examination?

[skgrey]

So do they recover all of the parts and go over them closely to look for stress fractures/bad parts/etc?

When they are developing a new rocket, I would certainly hope they do more than a few of these test flights. One successful test flight doesn't thrill me. Multiple test flights utilizing different manufacturing runs of critical parts does.

Did it really go ok?

[Mordstrom]

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?

Re:Uh huh

[ColdWetDog]

I don't put a lot of faith in what the media gets wind of with regard to space technology.

Especially 'media' articles that can't keep tense consistent through five paragraphs. It's not like this guy is editing War and Peace.

It is now safe to get off my lawn.

Re:Uh huh

[garcia]

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.

Ok, I am not a space nerd but I enjoy rockets and think they're cool to watch. That said, I watched the thing take off and it looked like any other damn rocket that has ever taken off before. Personally, while I'm glad we're retiring the Shuttle, I thought they were a whole lot fucking cooler than this rocket. I really feel like we've regressed to the 1960s.

What happened during stage separation?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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?

Re:Put Up Or Shut Up

[RedDrake]

Well, the way I see it the Ares I is all about a heavy lifting body. That's somthing the shuttle really wasn't ever really capeable of. So to that end I'm very happy.

Going back to the moon isn't simply to say we could. We no longer have all the experianced people from the 60's and early 70's who ran the first Apollo missions. If we can't make it back to the moon then there is no reason to try for mars. To do a mars mission properly, we have to make sure we still can make it to the moon.

Between ARES for Lifting and VASMIR for going. We could be looking at very intresting time for exploration.

Re:economic stupidity

[jo_ham]

"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.

Some notes regarding the launch

[FleaPlus]

Some items to note:

• The rocket [nationalgeographic.com] [nationalgeographic.com] was the tallest [space.com] [space.com] (and possibly most expensive, at $450 million) suborbital rocket ever assembled, consisting of a solid rocket motor from the Space Shuttle and an Atlas V avionics system, with a non-functional upper stage put on top.
• The Ares I-X has roughly the same shape (but different internal components) compared to NASA's planned medium-lift Ares I, which is scheduled to be completed after 2017 with an estimated cost of $1-$2 billion per launch. A lot of people have been calling this a flight test of the Ares I, but considering how drastically different the Ares I would be in flight, it's really quite a stretch, and it also unfortunately doesn't address any of the biggest potential problems with the Ares I (5-segment booster vibration properties, launch abort survivability, etc.). If anything, it's more similar to a full-size wind tunnel test.
• Even though the fate of the Ares I itself (and the overall future direction [thespacereview.com] [thespacereview.com] of NASA spaceflight) is uncertain, the >700 sensors on the Ares I-X should provide data useful for validating computer models [spaceflightnow.com] [spaceflightnow.com] used by NASA."
• For all its faults, it's still worth noting that this is somewhat of an accomplishment for NASA, as its the first new launch vehicle design they've attempted to launch in 30 years, after a long string of failed designs (X-30, X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Orbital Space Plane). Actually, now that I think about it, the DC-X [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] successfully launched, although I suppose that was constructed by McDonnell Douglas for the DOD before it was transferred to (and canceled by) NASA. Of course, one could still ask why NASA is trying to internally design a new vehicle when the private sector has a much better track record over the past 30 years of bringing new launch vehicle designs into service, but I imagine it's still been a learning experience for NASA. Hopefully they'll learn the right lessons from it, whatever those are.

(I largely copied this from a comment I made yesterday, but it still seems pertinent)

Re:What's next?

[FleaPlus]

They are excited about things that other countries like Russia have been doing for decades? Huh? Progress?

Technically speaking, the US has been able to build new human-capable rockets for decades as well, with the Atlas V, Delta IV, and SpaceX Falcon 9 (scheduled for later this year). The difference is that those are private companies. This has been NASA's first newly designed rocket launched in ~30 years (albeit a suborbital rocket), although one wonders if it's truly necessary for NASA to spend $35-$45 billion to try to duplicate the capability already provided by US companies.

Re:Did it really go ok?

[Goldenhawk]

I'm an aerospace engineer - I work on planes, but the concepts are familiar and common.

The upper stage DID tumble immediately. The other three aerospace engineers and test pilots watching with me also immediately said "That didn't look right."

The high-zoom ground tracking camera and onboard cameras showed it much better during the replays, where it's clear the separation wasn't as clean as it should have been. But it did not look like the stages hit each other.

It appeared that not all eight of the retro-rockets fired. They were designed to slow the first stage enough to separate the two stages, before the "tumble rockets" fired. From the footage, the retro-rocket flame is visibly asymmetrical. It appeared that only a few of the retro-rockets fired on one side of the aft skirt fairing. As a result, I suspect that the initial separation was not purely fore-aft, but included a healthy rotational component which nudged the second "dummy" stage in a similar slow tumble.

Some comments on this board say "no worries"; the second stage was just an unpowered dummy mass, and the tumble would have been stopped by the final design's engine. Not completely true. They need a clean, non-rotational separation before the second stage engine fires and can fully stabilize the flight path. So the tumble will DEFINITELY concern the engineers.

Finally, don't worry too much about the onboard cameras cutting in and out. Speaking from personal experience in the flight test industry, telemetry is no trivial matter, and downlinking gigabits/sec of data and video is no small feat. Minor mis-alignments in antenna angle can cause momentary signal dropout. Strong jolts (stage burnout, etc.) can also jostle wiring and cause interruptions.

Despite this tumble, the flight appeared to be overall a great success. As the launch director noted to his crew shortly after the flight, the only real delays on the first launch of a very complicated test vehicle were weather-induced (plus the small matter of a fabric probe cover sock that snagged on something yesterday). All in all, I'm quite impressed.

Re:Uh huh

[mcgrew]

Of course, the liftoff was NASA's Image of the Day [nasa.gov] (full sized image linked). The Image of the Day page is here [nasa.gov]. Two more images of the day of the Aries:

Ares I-X at the Launch Pad [nasa.gov]
Building the Aries [nasa.gov]

There are sure to be more pictures of Aries the rest of the week. That site has some amazing photos.