KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--Running a day late, NASA launched its 33-story Ares I-X rocket on a $445 million unmanned test flight Wednesday, a spectacular six-minute sub-orbital mission to collect data needed for the design of NASA's proposed shuttle replacement.
"Oh, man! Well, how impressive is that?" Program Manager Jeff Hanley told the launch team after the spent rocket fell back to the Atlantic Ocean. "I hope you appreciate that you've accomplished a great step forward for exploration."
Said Launch Director Ed Mango: "Think about what we just did. Our first flight test, and the only thing we're waiting on is weather. That says you all did frickin' fantastic! So thank you very much."
Vapor clouds form around NASA's unmanned Ares I-X rocket as it accelerates through the region of maximum aerodynamic pressure less than a minute after liftoff Tuesday.
(Credit: Ben Cooper/Spaceflight Now)The 327-foot-tall unmanned rocket roared to life at 11:30 a.m. EDT and majestically climbed away from launch complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center atop a torrent of 5,000-degree flame and a cloud of churning exhaust.
Liftoff came three-and-a-half hours behind schedule because of overnight thunderstorms and nearby lightning strikes that required unplanned tests, along with cloudy weather that posed a risk of static charge buildups that could have interfered with communications.
The weather went in and out of limits all morning, but a break in the cloud cover gave Mango the window he needed to come out of a hold at the T-minus four-minute mark and proceed on to launch.
When the countdown hit zero, four massive hold-down bolts exploded, the booster's load of solid propellant ignited and the rocket began climbing away.
An instant after booster ignition, the rocket's nozzle moved slightly to steer the Ares I-X away from the gantry, preventing the hot exhaust from hitting launch pad structures. The maneuver was apparent to the unaided eye and the rocket stayed well away from the gantry.
Using a four-segment space shuttle solid-fuel booster as the first stage and a dummy upper stage simulator, the unusual-looking rocket - the tallest launcher since NASA's huge Saturn 5 moon rocket - cleared the gantry in about six seconds and then soared away to the East.
The Ares I-X rocket blasts off from pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center.
(Credit: Ben Cooper/Spaceflight Now)It was the first launching in NASA's post-Columbia Constellation program, which calls for development of manned and unmanned Ares rockets, Orion crew capsules and landers designed to support Antarctica-style moon bases in the 2020s.
But the Obama administration is re-evaluating NASA's manned space program and whether it makes sense to return to the moon while assessing a report from an independent panel of experts that concluded NASA did not have enough money to carry out the Constellation program.
The panel suggested it would make more sense to abandon the Ares I rocket in favor of rockets and crew capsules provide by private industry on a commercial basis. Under that approach, NASA could focus on development of the heavy lift rockets needed to carry astronauts to a variety of deep-space targets.
Given the political uncertainty in Washington, it's unclear if the Ares I rocket that Tuesday's test flight was designed to support will ever actually fly.
But NASA managers and engineers were elated to get the huge test rocket off the ground and the towering booster lived up to expectations, putting on a spectacular show for space center workers, area residents, and tourists.
"Vindication really does not describe it well," Hanley said after the flight. "It's a sense of validation that the course that we had laid out is executable. An early demonstration like this puts aside any doubt in our minds, if we had them, as to the flyability of this particular design.
"We have a design that will do the country service, if it is put into service," he said. "The performance of the vehicle was very pleasing, to put it mildly."
Twenty seconds after liftoff, the rocket reached its maximum thrust of 3.16 million pounds of push with an internal pressure of 895 pounds per square inch.
The flight plan called for the rocket's nozzle to move back and forth 0.12 degrees 34 seconds after liftoff in a "programmed test input" to collect data on the stiffness of the vehicle and how it responded to dynamic changes.
The results of the nozzle deflections were too subtle to be visible to the unaided eye and the rocket appeared to stay solidly on course as it accelerated through the sound barrier 39 seconds after liftoff.
Long-range tracking cameras showed the rocket making only slight rolling motions about its long axis as small roll control rockets fired to maintain the proper orientation. Roll control was a question mark early on in the rocket's development, but engineers said it was not a problem in flight.
Another "programmed test input" - moving the nozzle by 0.12 degrees - presumably began at 55 seconds into flight. Five seconds after that, the Ares I-X was expected to experience maximum dynamic pressure of 850 pounds per square foot, subjecting the booster to the greatest stress it would experience in flight.
A 0.35 degree programmed test input was planned for 75 seconds into flight with a final 1-degree side-to-side yaw maneuver scheduled for 93.6 seconds.
The rocket accelerated to a peak velocity of about 4.5 times the speed of sound, reaching an altitude of 25.2 miles. At that point, when the rocket's thrust fell to less than 40,000 pounds of push, an explosive charge fired to separate the first stage from the dummy upper stage.
A wide-angle shot of the Ares I-X rocket climbing away through a partly cloudy sky.
(Credit: Ben Cooper/Spaceflight Now)An instant later, eight upward-firing rockets at the base of the booster ignited to back the first stage away from the second, a maneuver clearly visible in long-range tracking camera views.
But in a departure from the expected flight program, the dummy second stage went into a flat tumble as it continued along its ballistic trajectory instead of maintaining a nose-forward orientation. The dummy upper stage rose to a maximum altitude of about 150,000 feet before arcing over and plunging back to Earth 150 miles east of the space center.
In a final major test, three 150-foot-wide parachutes were designed to deploy to lower the spent first-stage booster casing to the Atlantic Ocean where a NASA recovery ship was standing by to tow it back to Port Canaveral. A camera on the rocket showed a smaller drogue parachute deployed, but video stopped moments later and the main chutes were not seen.
But the recovery ship quickly located the booster and a NASA spokesman said the crew of an aircraft flying over the floating rocket later said all three parachutes were visible in the water. An initial assessment, sources said, indicated normal blistering on the rocket and a dent of unknown origin in the aft segment.
"We completely met our success criteria, in fact we blew them away," said Mission Manager Bob Ess. "The first one was to roll out (to the launch pad), obviously we did that one. Clear the pad, we did that without a problem. Fly the intended flight path, we certainly did that, we confirmed that. And the last one was to learn from the flight.
"So far, we're on a path to learn a lot. The separation seemed a little different than we predicted as far as how the upper stage reacted after separation. So right there's an opportunity for us to jump in and figure out what was different in the actual flight from our models. So, hugely successful."
It will take engineers several weeks to complete a quick-look analysis of data from more than 700 sensors that measured pressures, stresses, temperatures, and other factors throughout the flight. But the initial results indicated no major problems.
The first man on the moon took a moment Monday, on the 40th anniversary of his "giant leap," to remember the Apollo program and the engineering triumph that won the Cold War space race and opened the door to the manned exploration of the solar system.
Speaking at an Apollo celebration at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, Neil Armstrong enjoyed a standing ovation before sharing his view of the achievement that carried him to the moon, concluding with a simple, heartfelt "Apollo was a good thing to do."
Neil Armstrong's shadow on the moon.
(Credit: NASA)"Thank you so much," he said from the stage. "Whenever I come to this city, if I have 20 minutes to spare, I come to this building. Not necessarily to look at craft hanging from the ceiling and sitting on the floors. But to absorb, by osmosis or radiation or some unknown mechanism, some of the history that resides here. And it must have worked, because as one young man recently said to me, 'Pop, you're history!'
"So let me take one minute to recount some of those flights that we saw in the video earlier. Forty winters have passed since the first manned flights of the Apollo spacecraft. And so, let's kind of return to that remarkable time between October of 1968 and November of 1969.
"Those 13 months began with the first manned Apollo flight, which demonstrated the ability of its command module to fly longer than the duration of a round trip to the moon. Just two months later, the second flight, in a remarkably bold move, flew to, and orbited, the moon.
"The third flight, in Earth orbit, tested the lunar module in its inaugural flight. Two months later, the fourth flight took a lunar module to lunar orbit in a dress rehearsal that demonstrated the ability of mission control to communicate and track two vehicles in different orbits about the moon.
"The fifth flight completed the final step, demonstrating the ability to descend to, land on, and return from the moon to lunar orbit. The sixth flight, the last flight of 1969m, was nearly operational, landing on the lunar surface precisely alongside the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, which had arrived there two-and-a-half years earlier.
"No flight test program of any complex flying machine was ever conducted so efficiently and with such a small number of flights. Six more ever more complex and difficult flights would continue the Apollo exploration program over the following three years.
"Those successes were very impressive 40 years ago, but they were not miraculous. They were the result of the imagination and inventive minds of the people in the Apollo project since its inception eight years earlier. Those years engendered some of the most challenging, most difficult and most productive work in the history of modern engineering.
"Eight years, including a year and a half of redesign as a consequence of those deficiencies that were responsible for the tragic and fatal fire of the Apollo 1 spacecraft. Creating a strategy, a configuration and a craft to carry men to the moon was staggeringly complex. It required the very best in creativity, determination and perseverance that could be assembled in the American workplace.
"Seldom in recorded history have so many government employees so intensely and for such long hours worked at their chores. And seldom have so many aerospace engineers and craftsmen been so careful, so diligent and so determined.
"It was a superb national enterprise. Our knowledge of the moon increased a thousand-fold and more. Techniques were developed for interplanetary navigation and travel. Our home planet has been seen from afar and that perspective has caused us to think about its - and our - significance.
"Children, inspired by the excitement of space flight, have come to appreciate the wonder of science, the beauty of mathematics, and the precision of engineering. Young minds in our own country and around the world now believe they can do great things. And they can, if they apply themselves as intensely as the Apollo workforce did four decades ago.
"Tonight, we remember a special time. We remember a time, a passion for perfection, we remember a level of achievement, which really surprised us all. Human interest and media coverage this month confirmed that many others remember that time and remember Apollo with some warmth and even a little admiration.
"It left a lasting imprint on society and history. Tonight, we remember and congratulate all those who made it possible. Apollo was a good thing to do."
Forty years after the Apollo 11 voyage to the moon, NASA released photographs from the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft Friday showing five of the six Apollo landing sites. Shadows cast by the Apollo descent stages are clearly visible and in some cases, the moon walkers' paths can be seen in the disturbed dust.
The Apollo 11 landing site, photographed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The scene is 925 feet across.
(Credit: NASA)"We were very interested in getting our first peek at the lunar module descent stages just for the thrill - and to see how well the cameras had come into focus," Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the LRO's main camera, said in a statement. "Indeed, the images are fantastic and so is the focus."
The Apollo 11, 14, 15, 16, and 17 landing sites were photographed between July 11 and 15. The Apollo 12 landing site will be imaged during upcoming orbits.
The Apollo 14 landing site as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
(Credit: NASA)Launched June 18, the Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter braked into an initially elliptical orbit around the moon on June 23. It eventually will be maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high orbit, allowing it to photograph surface features - including the Apollo landing sites - with three times greater resolution than the pictures released Friday.
Equipped with seven state-of-the-art cameras and other instruments, LRO was built to look for suitable landing sites for future manned missions while creating the most detailed lunar atlas ever assembled.
The solar-powered spacecraft also will measure the solar and cosmic radiation that future lunar explorers will face and map out the surface topology, mineralogy, and chemical composition of Earth's nearest neighbor. One year will be spent scouting future landing sites followed by three years of purely scientific observations.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched June 18 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, has beamed back its first pictures of the moon as engineers continue instrument checkout and calibration prior to the start of its primary mission.
The LRO spacecraft braked into a highly elliptical orbit around the moon June 23. A series of rocket firings have now placed the satellite in its so-called commissioning orbit, one with a low point of about 19 miles and a high point of 124 miles. Later this summer, it will be maneuvered into a circular 31-mile-high orbit around the moon's poles.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was turned on June 30. The first test images showed cratered terrain in the lunar highlands south of the Sea of Clouds. Each picture represents a square measuring 0.87 miles wide.
A test image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing cratered terrain near the southern lunar highlands south of the Sea of Clouds.
(Credit: NASA)Four-and-a-half days after launch, NASA's $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter fired its main thrusters for 40 minutes early Tuesday, successfully braking into an initially elliptical orbit around the moon.
The critical rocket firing began around 5:47 a.m. EDT and ended as planned at 6:27 a.m., putting the spacecraft into an orbit tilted 30 degrees from the moon's poles with a low point of 136 miles and a high point of 1,926 miles.
A graphic showing LRO's path to the moon and the result of a 40-minute rocket firing Tuesday that slowed the craft enough for capture by the moon's gravity.
(Credit: NASA)"All stations, this is flight," said lead flight director Rick Saylor. "Congratulations on a successful LOI (lunar orbit insertion) to return NASA to the moon."
Over the next five days, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry out four additional rocket firings to put the spacecraft in its so-called commissioning orbit with a low point of just 18.5 miles above the moon's south pole and a high point of 134 miles above the north pole. The orbit eventually will be circularized at about 31 miles above the moon.
"The tracking shows we're essentially where we planned to be, we're at the moon," said Craig Tooley, the LRO project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "It went like clockwork. With a mission like this, we spent literally years practicing for every possible contingency to be ready for this. In the end, it went exactly as planned."
LRO will spend two months in its commissioning orbit for instrument checkout and calibration before maneuvering into the desired 31-mile-high mapping orbit.
Equipped with seven state-of-the-art cameras and other instruments, LRO will look for suitable landing sites for future manned missions while creating the most detailed lunar atlas ever assembled.
The two-ton solar-powered spacecraft also will measure the solar and cosmic radiation that future lunar explorers will face and map out the surface topology, mineralogy, and chemical composition of Earth's nearest neighbor. One year will be spent scouting future landing sites followed by three years of purely scientific observations.
A NASA graphic showing the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in orbit around the moon.
(Credit: NASA)"Over the course of an entire year...we will have a global measurement of the moon and have a new set of data, essentially a new atlas of the moon that has not only measurements of topology and temperature but minerals and then global images of the moon," LRO project scientist Rich Vondrak said before launch.
"One of our primary objectives is to identify safe landing sites for future human return to the moon. The Apollo program accepted risk and was able to have safe landings. We want to return to the moon, make repeated landings in some areas and be able to go there with a higher degree of safety."
Using the data collected by LRO, he said, "we'll get new views of the moon and we will prepare for the next generation of explorers and scientists the handbook, the guidebook for future exploration of the moon."
LRO was launched by an Atlas 5 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station last Thursday along with a companion spacecraft, the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The two spacecraft separated shortly after launch.
LCROSS is designed to guide the Atlas 5's spent Centaur second stage to an impact in a permanently shadowed crater near the moon's south pole on October 9. Instruments aboard LCROSS, LRO, the Hubble Space Telescope and at observatories on Earth will study the debris thrown up by the crash to look for evidence of ice, a critical resource for future outposts.
Updated at 2:40 p.m. EDT: Adding the name of the LRO flight director.
An Atlas 5 rocket thundered to life and streaked into space Thursday, hurling two NASA spacecraft toward the moon for a $583 million mission to scout out landing sites for future manned missions and to search for evidence of hidden ice near its frigid poles.
One spacecraft will map the cratered surface from a perilously low 31-mile-high orbit while the other will blast out 350 tons of pulverized rock and soil for chemical analysis, digging a shallow 66-foot-wide crater in a kamikaze crash visible from Earth.
"First, we want to identify safe landing sites," said project scientist Rich Vondrak. "Then, we want to search for resources on the moon. And finally, we want to get better insight into the space radiation environment and how it may be harmful to humans."
Delayed 20 minutes by nearby thunderstorms, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket's RD-180 first stage engine ignited at 5:32 p.m., slowly pushing the towering rocket away from launch complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
An Atlas 5 rocket takes off on a NASA mission to scout out lunar landing sites and to search for hidden ice near the moon's poles.
(Credit: United Launch Alliance)Spectacular rocket cam views showed the Atlas 5's fiery exhaust plume against the cloud-draped limb of planet Earth and the deep black of space. Another camera showed the nose cone fairing falling away, exposing the satellite payload to view.
Two firings by the Atlas 5's hydrogen-fueled Centaur second stage successfully boosted the dual-spacecraft payload onto a four-day trajectory to the moon.
The $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, equipped with seven state-of-the-art cameras and other instruments, will look for suitable landing sites for future manned missions while creating the most detailed lunar atlas ever assembled.
The 4,200-pound solar-powered spacecraft also will measure the solar and cosmic radiation that future lunar explorers will face and map out the surface topology, mineralogy and chemical composition of Earth's nearest neighbor. One year will be spent scouting future landing sites followed by three years of purely scientific observations.
While its cameras will not be able to detect the footprints of the 12 Apollo astronauts who once walked on the moon, they will be able to see the landing stages, rovers and other equipment that were left behind.
LRO's companion, the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or Lcross, faces a much shorter lifetime. With LRO on its own, Lcross will maneuver the spent Atlas 5's Centaur second stage into a looping four-month orbit back around the Earth.
If all goes well, Lcross will aim itself and the Centaur back at the moon, targeting a permanently shadowed crater near the south pole for a dramatic crash landing October 9. With LRO looking on from lunar orbit, the 5,000-pound Centaur will hit the dark surface at some 5,600 mph, blasting out a 66-foot-wide crater some 13 feet deep.
The debris excavated by the impact will be blown high above the lunar surface, some of it above the crater's rim and into sunlight for the first time in 2 billion years or more.
Lcross, following close behind the Centaur on a virtually identical course, will fly through the debris cloud, spending four precious minutes studying the composition of the material and looking for signs of water ice with a suite of nine instruments.
Then it, too, will crash to the moon less than 2 miles away after dutifully transmitting its data back to Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope will monitor the impact, as will amateur and professional astronomers in the Western hemisphere, looking for the flash that will signal the Centaur's demise.
The LRO/Lcross mission is NASA's first trip to the moon since the more modest Lunar Prospector was launched in 1998. The new missions are part of NASA's post-Columbia program to send astronauts back to the moon to establish a permanent Antarctica-style research station starting around 2020.
The Bush administration approved the new plan and President Obama endorsed the resumption of moon flights during his campaign.
But earlier this year, the White House Office of Management and Budget cut $3.1 billion from NASA's projected budgets through 2013--money needed to begin development of a heavy-life moon rocket--and the president ordered an independent re-assessment of NASA's long-range goals.
The review panel held its first public hearing Wednesday and its final report is expected by the end of the summer.
Regardless of the ultimate fate of NASA's manned moon program, the two spacecraft launched Thursday promise to greatly advance understanding of the moon's history and evolution, along with making the first serious attempt to identify favorable landing sites for future long-duration visits.
A 'rocket cam' view of the Atlas 5's first stage exhaust plume during the climb to space.
(Credit: NASA TV)Separating from the Lcross/Centaur shortly after launch, LRO will fly to the moon on its own. After a long rocket firing Tuesday morning to brake into an elliptical orbit, engineers will spend up to two months checking out and calibrating the spacecraft's instruments and maneuvering it into a circular 31-mile-high orbit.
For comparison, the orbits used by Apollo command modules were about 70 miles high.
"As its name says, LRO is all about doing reconnaissance at the moon," said Craig Tooley, the mission's project manager at Goddard. "Reconnaissance, specifically, to bring us back the data and the information we need to plan and execute the human return to the moon.
"An inevitable question I get is 'why do we need LRO? Haven't we done this?' And, indeed, of course, we've been to the moon. But when we went to the moon for Apollo, we went to the equatorial regions and we intentionally planned to not stay for very long.
And even at the onset of our renewed commitment to send human beings to the moon back in 2004, we knew then if we were going to go to the moon with the more ambitious goals we have now of staying longer and perhaps establishing outposts, we were going to go to a different place."
Scientists and engineers thinking about future outposts on the moon are focused on the polar regions, where areas in permanent sunlight offer unlimited solar power. Conversely, permanently shadowed craters nearby offer the prospect of ice deposits and along with them, a source of water, oxygen and hydrogen rocket fuel.
"We actually have much better maps of Mars than we have of our own moon's polar regions," Tooley said. "So the job of filling out that information set, making that atlas complete for planning safe and fruitful return to the moon, that job fell to LRO."
The Lcross mission is much more tightly focused.
Earlier lunar probes detected indirect evidence of water ice in dark polar regions. Scientists believe ice could indeed be trapped in polar craters that never see sunlight, brought in by comet impacts over the billions of years since the moon's formation.
The Centaur impact is designed to blast out material in the top few feet of a shadowed crater's floor where ice deposits are suspected.
"There's data out there which could show it's potentially ice rinks," said Lcross project manager Dan Andrews. "There's data out there that shows it's blocky. There's data out there that could support the fact that there might not be water ice there," said Dan Andrews, the Lcross project manager. "So that illustrates the importance of this mission. Let's go see what it is.
"The benefit of having water ice there is self-evident. The availability of water right there on the moon, availability of producing oxygen, oxidizer for rocket fuel for other missions, it's very, very interesting if water ice is indeed there."
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