Post by PHONETOOL on Oct 27, 2009 6:37:50 GMT -5
NASA ready to launch 'moon rocket'
Engineers made final preparations Tuesday morning for the long-awaited launch of NASA's towering Ares I-X rocket - the 33-story centerpiece of a $445 million test flight expected to generate valuable engineering data for development of a post-shuttle replacement.
The planned launch comes on the heels of a report by a presidential panel of space experts that concluded NASA's current plans to build new Ares rockets and establish bases on the moon by the early 2020s is not feasible without an additional $3 billion to $6 billion a year.
The slender Ares I-X, its second stage wider than the first, stands twice as tall as a space shuttle "stack." But its pencil-thin appearance quickly led to a somewhat derisive nickname: the "stick."
The US space agency Nasa is preparing for its first test launch of a new rocket it hopes will take astronauts back to the moon and beyond.
Mission controllers say all systems are in place to launch the Ares I-X rocket at 1200GMT on Tuesday from a modified shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, although meteorologists have said poor weather could cause a last minute delay.
The $445m rocket also faces doubts over its future and could even be scrapped following criticism from a government panel that Nasa's ambitious goals were "unsustainable" given available resources.
The prototype Ares I-X rocket, taller than the Statue of Liberty, will fly for just over two minutes and will not leave Earth's atmosphere.
The main part of the rocket will return to Earth using parachutes and will be recovered after splashing down in the Atlantic.
Nasa officials hope the flight will provide valuable data on the rocket's performance, despite deep uncertainty over the space programme's future.
The 100m high rocket is a key part of Nasa's planned next generation of manned vehicles - dubbed Constellation - which the agency hopes will replace the ageing space shuttle fleet due to be retired next year.
It hopes to use an Ares rocket to launch the first astronauts into orbit in 2015, beginning a new chapter of manned space flight that it says will take humans back to the moon and onwards to a landing on Mars.
A much larger rocket, the Ares V, would be used to blast the necessary hardware into space which would then rendezvous with the manned capsule before the assembled spacecraft begins its mission.
But an independent panel of experts last week threw cold water over Nasa's ambitions in a report to the White House, warning that the agency needs $3bn a year in extra funding to meet its goals.
A seven-hour countdown began at 1 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, targeting the opening of a four-hour launch window at 8 a.m.
Watch the launch live www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html