http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/science/space/29rocket.html?hp

Beautiful

NASA Rocket Takes Off as Clouds Break



By KENNETH CHANG
Published: October 28, 2009
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. For first time since 1981, the rocket that took off Wednesday from a launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center here was not a space shuttle.

Related
New Rocket, but Future of Program Is Unclear (October 26, 2009)

For NASA, Possible Shifts in Direction (October 23, 2009)

With a clearing in a partly cloudy sky, the Ares I-X rocket a prototype of the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations next-generation Ares I rocket zipped off at 11:30 a.m., heading east over the Atlantic Ocean.

After rising through blue sky for two minutes, the first stage expended its fuel at an altitude of more than 25 miles, separated and parachuted into the ocean. After separation, the dummy second stage spun around before plunging into the ocean. The final Ares I rocket is to have a second-stage engine and a crew capsule to carry four astronauts into orbit to the International Space Station.

As tall as a 32-story building but with a first stage only 12 feet wide, the Ares I-X looked skinny and top-heavy. Yet it flew as envisioned.

For the NASA team working on the Constellation program to send astronauts to the Moon and beyond, the flight was a moment of smiles and joy, if not quite vindication. Critics have described the Ares I, which would be the first Constellation rocket to fly, as too expensive and technically flawed.

Vindication really does not describe it well, the program manager, Jeffrey Hanley, said at a news conference after the flight. Its a sense of validation that the course we have laid out is executable.

Mr. Hanley said the flight should sweep aside any doubts that the design was workable.

A blue-ribbon panel reviewing NASAs human spaceflight program said Ares I faced no insurmountable problems, but the group wondered if the agency might better spend its effort on a heavy-lift rocket and turn the business of carrying astronauts over to private companies.

With the Ares I-Xs success, proponents of Constellation may argue more passionately that maintaining the current path is a better choice.

All the naysayers, that was just one of the most beautiful rocket launches Ive ever seen, Robert D. Cabana, director of the Kennedy Space Center, told the people in the control room afterwards.

The launching came a day after efforts were thwarted by cloudy skies. Liftoff was rescheduled for 8 a.m. but then delayed as engineers checked electronic systems after lightning struck within a half-mile of the launching pad on Tuesday night.

Once ready, the mission managers waited on the weather. For spectators on the ground, the weather seemed not bad at all, with no signs of rain and a sky of broken clouds.

But because the Ares I-X is a new design, the weather criteria were stricter than for a shuttle launching. The worry was that if the rocket flew through a cloud, the friction of the water droplets could create static charge and disrupt communications.

At 11:20 a.m., a break in the clouds big enough for the rocket opened up. Ten minutes later, the rockets engine essentially a space shuttle solid rocket booster ignited with a window-rattling roar. By design, the rocket tilted away from the launching tower, then headed skyward.

The Ares I-X carried more than 700 sensors to measure the stresses and strains on the spacecraft. The data from the $445 million flight will allow engineers to refine their computer models and designs.

The first flight of the Ares I carrying astronauts is scheduled for March 2015.

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Now if only NASA could use the thing to launch the human-rated EELV proponents into LEO, life-support systems optional..........


Guess that would be asking for too much:/

"Now if only NASA could use the thing to launch the human-rated EELV proponents into LEO, life-support systems optional..........


Guess that would be asking for too much:/"

I'm not so much concerned about what their launching, but more as to what they intend to do once they get there (the moon). Like what your going to leave capsules on the surface...that's it? Well whoopdy-do, more junk on the moon in ten years.

I mean honestly, what do they intend to build on the moon to start harvesting the resources and building permanent structures? What is ultimate purpose, colonizing Mars, extracting the resources of the entire Solar System?

I think of far more interest in the immediate steps is the status of the Ares V, currently scheduled for maiden launch in 2018...I think that needs to be moved up a few years. After that what is the plan for utilizing space...efficiently at any rate?

---

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
George Bernard Shaw

Huge Explosion Was Biggest Space Rock to Strike Earth Since 1994
By Leonard David
SPACE.com's Space Insider Columnist
posted: 29 October 2009
02:48 pm ET

This story was updated at 4:50 p.m. EDT.

GOLDEN, Colo. A space rock explosion earlier this month over an island region of Indonesia is now being viewed as perhaps the biggest object to tangle with the Earth in more than a decade.

On Oct. 8, reports from Indonesia told of a loud air blast around 11 a.m. local time. One report indicated a bright fireball, accompanied by an explosion and lingering dust cloud, as the origin of the air blast.

According to experts at the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office in Pasadena, Calif. Don Yeomans, Paul Chodas, Steve Chesley the blast is thought to be due to the atmospheric entry of an asteroid more than 30 feet (10 meters) in diameter. Due to atmospheric pressure, the object is thought to have detonated in the atmosphere, yielding an energy release of about 50 kilotons (the equivalent of 110,000,000 pounds of TNT explosives).

"My understanding is that this may have been the largest object to strike the Earth since the fireball near the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific on February 1, 1994," said Clark Chapman, a noted specialist in asteroids and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo.

"Although the Indonesian object was large and the resulting atmospheric explosion may have been the equivalent of several Hiroshima bombs, it is not unexpected for our planet to be hit every decade or so by such an object," Chapman told SPACE.com.

Preliminary investigation

A preliminary look at the incident has been performed by Canadian researchers Peter Brown and graduate student Elizabeth Silber, of the Meteor Infrasound group in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

The researchers made a detailed examination of all International Monitoring System infrasound stations of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). An initial look found that a total of 11 stations showed probable signals from a large explosion.

Based on their scrutiny of the infrasound records, the Canadian research team reported that a large (40-50 kilotons of TNT) bolide detonation occurred near the coastal city of Bone in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The infrasonic geolocation is not precise enough to determine if the bolide was over water or land, but it was relatively near the coast, the team reported.

Follow-on observations from other instruments or ground recovery efforts, the Canadian team added, would be very valuable in further refining this unique event. Their analysis corresponds to an object some 16-33 feet (5-10 meters) in diameter. Based on the earlier work by Brown, such objects are expected to impact the Earth on average every two to 12 years.

"We are trying to coordinate with some local scientists to secure more local data, but that will likely take several weeks," Brown told SPACE.com.

Brown said a YouTube video that was aired a few days after the event convinced them it was a bolide.

"Had this happened over the ocean we would only have known that there had been a big explosion...we would presume it was a fireball, but it could be anything producing a large impulsive shock in the atmosphere," Brown said.

More data is expected from U.S. military space assets that likely detected the event. From their vantage point in space, multiple sensor systems would have seen the huge explosion and there surely is a rich dataset of measurements to be plumbed relating to the detonation.

Wall of secrecy

Why wasn't this asteroid observed before it hit?

SwRI's Chapman said he was not aware that the object was seen before it plowed into Earth's atmosphere.

"The body was large enough that some of the current Spaceguard Survey telescopes might have detected it a couple of days before it hit, were it coming from the night sky. But it struck during daytime and probably could not have been seen by those telescopes," Chapman explained.

A second question is whether it was detected by military satellites that monitor bright flashes in the Earth's atmosphere for defense and security purposes.

"Almost certainly it was detected and presumably immediately identified as an explosion of a large meteoroid rather than, say, an explosion of a human-made device in the atmosphere," Chapman figures. "But these satellites are secret and, in the past, the establishments controlling them have delayed releasing the data, for weeks or months."

Earlier this year, Chapman added, a change in previous policy led the U.S. military to withhold the data from the public.

"Scientists hope that they will reverse that policy. This event will demonstrate whether the wall of secrecy is coming down again, or not," Chapman noted. "Evidently, because of the passage of weeks since the event, there has been no decision to release the data promptly."

* Video - Asteroid Collision Watch
* Catastrophe Calculator: Estimate Asteroid Impact Effects Online
* Image Gallery - Asteroids in Space

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than four decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

source: www.space.com

//"I'm not so much concerned about what their launching, but more as to what they intend to do once they get there (the moon). Like what your going to leave capsules on the surface...that's it? Well whoopdy-do, more junk on the moon in ten years.

I mean honestly, what do they intend to build on the moon to start harvesting the resources and building permanent structures? What is ultimate purpose, colonizing Mars, extracting the resources of the entire Solar System?

I think of far more interest in the immediate steps is the status of the Ares V, currently scheduled for maiden launch in 2018...I think that needs to be moved up a few years. After that what is the plan for utilizing space...efficiently at any rate?"//



Yes, but you need both AresI and Ares V to reach the moon. Both are needed if we aspire to any permanent presence in space beyond LEO.