A five-week slip in NASA's final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission likely will have a ripple effect, pushing back the planned launch next April of the agency's first Ares rocket test flight at Kennedy Space Center to late May 2009, officials said today.
"Right now, the first blush impact assessment suggests a day-for-day slip," said Jeff Hanley, manager of NASA's Project Constellation Program Office, which is developing the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rockets along with Apollo-style Orion capsules and Altair lunar landers for a planned American return to the moon by 2020.
But project engineers and managers are looking at ways to mitigate the shuttle mission delay and reduce the resulting slip to the Ares 1 test flight. "We're working on that. We'll see," Hanley said.
The Ares 1-X mission will be the first of four test flights slated to be carried out under a $1.8 billion contract to design, develop and test the rocket's first stage: a five-segment shuttle-derived solid rocket booster.
The test flight originally was set for launch next April 15 from KSC's launch pad 39B -- the same pad NASA aims to use to launch a rapid-response rescue flight if Atlantis is critically damaged during the agency's fifth and final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission.
Astronauts on that flight won't be able to seek safe haven on the International Space Station because the Hubble telescope is in an entirely different orbit, and Atlantis won't have enough propellant to fly to the outpost in an emergency. So NASA intends to have Endeavour ready to fly on pad 39B when Atlantis launches from pad 39A.
NASA had planned to launch the Hubble servicing mission on Aug. 28, but a slow-down in shuttle external tank production is forcing the agency to push back the flight.
Senior managers next Thursday will consider changing the target launch date for the launch to Oct. 8, a move that's largely the result of the extra time now required to manufacture shuttle external tanks equipped with all post-Columbia safety modifications.
The slip also will delay the turn-over of pad 39B to the Ares 1X test team. That will delay pad modifications and launch preparations, forcing a launch delay until sometime in late May 2009, Hanley said.
The inaugural test flight will employ a four-segment shuttle booster, an empty fifth segment and mock-ups of an Ares 1 second atage, Orion spacecraft and a tractor-rocket launch abort system. The empty fifth segment and the dummy upper stages will act as mass simulators that sport outer mold lines that are aerodynamically exact copies of Ares 1 rocket hardware and Orion spacecraft.
The $320 million mission will test first-stage flight control systems as well as the system that separates the first and second stage along with the parachutes that lower the first to the ocean's surface.
The test flight is aimed at ferreting out any design changes that should be made prior to a planned critical design review of all Ares 1 rocket systems in March of 2010. Ares 1 project manager Steve Cook of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center said data from the test flight is needed at least six months ahead of the review.
- Todd Halvorson
ABOUT THE IMAGE: NASA artist's concept of the Ares 1X vehicle on launch pad 39B prior to its first test flight.
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