Why is Moving Ares 1-X "Historic"?

I would be excited if this was a 4 segment SRB with an SSME upper stage. 5 year gap kinda takes the wind out of my sails.

This is laughable. The only reason for this is a "make work" job to show that the ARES 1 folks are doing something to keep the funding coming.

As far as historic space development. The success of Ad Astra with the 200kw VASIMR engine will have more of an impact on the future of REAL space exploration than ARES. And how much has the government spent on that? Not the billions wasted with the ATK roman candle.

Ares 1-X it is historic because it will be the first test flight of the most expensive U.S. government space transportation system in history. So expensive that NASA won't even have a budget large enough to afford to fly Ares 1 if it is operational by 2017.

"Historic" is definitely the wrong word, but their should be a certain amount of interest in this roll out to the media. This is the first non-shuttle to roll out in how long?? That's where the interest lies.

I'm willing to cut NASA some slack on this because the Ares 1-X rollout will definitely be something out of the ordinary. Maybe "unique" or "one of a kind" would be better than "historic."

On a personal level i hope that the flight of the Ares 1-X is a success but it might the only flight we see of the Ares rocket. I wonder if the vibration problems that have been reported with the rocket have been solved. Also what will NASA do if the flight is a failure because of vibration problems

Why is it 'historic'? Didn't you know? This is the rocket that will return America to the Moon and then take it on to Mars! This is as significant a moment as the first roll-out of the Saturn-V or of the Enterprise!

What's that? Ares-I can't do any of these things? It will need another, even larger rocket to get crews further away than orbit? Independent analysis has shown it to be too expensive and is possibly dangerous to fly? What's that? This isn't even that rocket at all but a mock-up made mostly of shuttle and Peacekeeper ICBM parts?

Well, that isn't the way NASA has been presenting it!

The moment the space agency started actively having to mislead the public and Congress to maintain support for its flagship HSF program, then it was in serious and perhaps terminal trouble.

Sometimes I get the feeling that a fairly large portion of the regular readers actually want the Ares 1x rocket/project/flight to fail just to vindicate their opinions of the design.

There seems to be so much concentration regarding space projects meeting their budget rather than simply looking at it from the perspective of if you want to do X, it may cost a whole bunch of $, so make a decision to do X knowing and expecting the budget or initial allocated funding to be blown.

That is saying that if we make a decision to expand beyond low earth orbit, then we need to expect that the budget to do this will be blown knowing that it will be worth it.

I'm sure it will look nice, but we should have had Apollo 2.0 in the same airframe or 2nd-gen spaceplane by now. The last 10 years of waffling and arguing have been painful. Still, looking forward to the launch of the first model rocket with an X-class engine!

This is a historical flight since the Ares I-X will be the largest solid rocket ever launched and so will be a good chance to take-in data on flight characteristics of a single SRB, including acoustic vibration and its TO effects. Though Ares I-X certainly it won't be identical, it will be anecdotal to a real Ares I flight. There really is a need to fund an Ares I-Y flight using a 5-segment SRB that would generate the needed data on TO, etc.

esmithatty, certainly Ares I program has its critics who are definitely going to be lighting candles and praying for Ares I-X to fail. Given that the DM-1 5-segment SRB motor test didn't go as expected by Ares I critics--that test demonstrated that at least the test article 5-seg. SRB was much smoother and quieter than simulations had predicted--this really will be their chance to see the Ares I program fail. If Ares I-X has a good launch, it will be that much harder politically to kill the Ares I program, esp. given nothing else out there is ready to take its place. And no, a re-engined, beefed-up and aerodynamically reconfigured Delta IV (HLV) won't be ready any time soon to replace Ares I.

If you follow the postings by Frank Sietzen, certainly Ares I faces more than a few political barriers, barriers that will be much harder to overcome I suspect than the technical ones. Some of the Ares I critics just simply have a technical aversion to solids and prefer liquids. I don't like solids too much but I think that if the history of the Shuttle program is any indicator, the SRB derived Ares I will be fine.

It is historic because this vehicle will provide at least a decade of service to the ISS, from 2015 to 2025, as a replacement to the Space Shuttle for crew transport. The ISS will not meet the Pacific Ocean any time soon, not even in 2020.

A five year "gap" is also nothing to be worried about, in NASA years. NASA, and the country, tolerated a ~2.5 year "gap" with Columbia. Five years is nothing. Money aside, NASA will be even more motivated to bringing Ares I to fruition, after the shuttle ceases operations.

No other design is even close to providing the capabilities of Ares. Jeff Hanley is right. Mike Griffin is right. You may not like these gentlemen, but you must bring facts to the table in order to have a well reasoned discussion. To date, this has not occurred.

Keith:

Are you going to be at the Ares 1 X rollout?

Will you be at the Ares 1 X launch?