NASA
and United Space Alliance engineers and technicians working
at NASA's Kennedy Space Center tested procedures they will
rely on to handle and load the propellant tanks that will be
used on the roll control system of the Ares I.
The latest testing on the new Ares I rocket brought together
components from an Air Force missile program with support
equipment invented for handling space shuttle parts.The
evaluation is the latest in a series of studies at NASA's
Kennedy Space Center leading up to the first test launch
scheduled for April 2009. The flight will not carry any
astronauts and is mainly a chance to evaluate the
performance of the rocket during the first stage of flight.
The roll control system is a set of thrusters aligned to
turn the Ares I stack soon after liftoff to line the rocket
up with its proper heading. The thruster system is the same
design as the one used by the Air Force's Peacekeeper
missile fleet. In fact, NASA used parts of a decommissioned
Peacekeeper as stand-ins during the test for the Ares I
parts.
The
Ares I is part of NASA's Constellation Program. The
323-foot-tall rocket is a pencil-shaped craft that uses a
five-segment solid rocket booster as a first stage and a
liquid-fueled upper stage. The stack is topped with an Orion
spacecraft. The Ares I will loft astronauts to the
International Space Station. Later missions call for the
rocket to send Orion capsules on the first leg of a trip to
the moon.
But before astronauts can ride the new spacecraft, it has to
be tested in flight. And before those flight tests can
begin, the people who will prepare the rockets need to learn
how to do so safely.
That's where this round of testing came in.
NASA's David Tomasic, a fluid systems engineer at Kennedy,
said both the propellant system components and the ground
support equipment the teams were trying out worked well. The
team focused particularly on the helium tanks to find out
how they would react when pressurized. The group also
studied the large titanium tanks that will hold hypergolic
fuel and oxidizer. Rather than perform the test using the
hazardous fuel, though, the group filled the tanks with
water and measured the results.
"We learned to make some adjustments on our ground support
equipment," Tomasic said. "Everything worked pretty much
flawlessly."
With the evaluation behind it, the team is looking forward
to the arrival in September of the components that will be
used in the first Ares test flight.
"When you get hardware sitting down at KSC, you know you're
moving," Tomasic said.
Larger versions of the concept drawing...
