NASA's new crew exploration vehicle, Orion blasts into space atop an Aries I rocket. (Illustration by Transluszent.de)
The "brains" of the Ares I rocket that will send four astronauts back to the moon sometime in the next 12 years will be built by Boeing, NASA announced today—but the specifications will be open-source and non-proprietary, so that other companies can bid on future contracts. The avionics unit will provide guidance, navigation and control for the launch rocket, which will carry the
Orion crew vehicle into Earth orbit.
“The combined Ares I and
Orion will replace the Space Shuttle and become the workhorse that takes astronauts into space for journeys to the Space Station, the Moon and Mars,” said Doug Cooke, a official with NASA’s Exploration Systems division. The Shuttle is currently slated for retirement in 2010.
The $800 million avionics deal is the last one in a series of four Ares I contracts issued in the past five months, totaling $5 billion. Pratt & Whitney is building the engine for $1.2 billion, Alliant Techsystems is building the first-stage solid rocket booster for $1.8 billion, and Boeing had earlier won the $1.125 billion upper-stage contract.
NASA’s Constellation program, which aims to return humans to the moon by 2020, will use the Ares I rocket to launch
Orion into orbit. A larger Ares V rocket, which will be developed based on the Ares I design beginning early in the next decade, will rendezvous with
Orion in orbit and provide the extra units needed to escape Earth’s orbit. But that doesn’t mean that Boeing can count on billions of dollars of contracts for the Ares V, noted Ares project manager Steve Cook. The specifications for the Ares I design are “open-source and non-proprietary,” he said, ensuring that future contracts will have full competition.
Preliminary work on Ares I has already involved 3500 hours of wind-tunnel testing, and last month the team field-tested an enormous parachute that will allow the rocket’s first-stage boosters to be recovered and reused. A 42,000-pound dead weight was dropped from a U.S. Air Force C-17 from 16,500 feet above the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, and it safely floated to the ground under a 2000-pound, 150-ft.-diameter parachute—the biggest chute of its type ever to be tested.
With all the contracts in place, the Ares team is now headed for a preliminary design review next year. The team hopes to fire up its first development motor in April 2009, Cook said, and continue meeting the benchmarks leading to a 2020 moon voyage.
“I don’t think there’s any magic here,” Beoing vice-president Brewster Shaw said. “We all have a lot of hard work ahead of us over the coming years.”
Source
By Alex Hutchinson
Illustration by Transluszent.de
Published on: December 12, 2007
NASA Will Tinker With Open-Source Rocket for Return to Moon
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