Ares 1 x Rocket,Ares 1 X Test Flight

Ares 1 x Rocket,Ares 1 X Test Flight:Nasa is celebrating the inaugural flight of its giant Ares 1-X rocket despite concerns that the White House may scrap the launcher because it costs too much.

The slender 100m-tall rocket, which is designed to replace the ageing space shuttle, blasted off at 11.30am local time from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The $455m unmanned test flight gave Nasa staff the opportunity to monitor the new rocket’s performance and hardware systems as it soared to an altitude of about 28 miles in two minutes before falling back into the Atlantic.The demonstration flight marks a critical milestone in Nasa’s plans to develop the Ares rocket as a replacement for the space shuttle, which is due to retire as early as next year.

The launch took place after poor weather frustrated launch attempts yesterday.

Ares 1 x Rocket Grounding the shuttle fleet will free up funds to complete the Ares rocket programme but will leave astronauts from America, Europe and elsewhere reliant on the Russian Soyuz rocket for a ride to the international space station.

Nasa has developed two versions of the Ares launcher. One will carry the crew into space, while the other will lift their equipment and supplies to a rendezvous point in orbit. The rockets are the workhorses of Nasa’s Constellation programme, which aims to give the agency the capability to ferry astronauts to the international space station and return humans to the moon by 2020.

The Ares rocket is tentatively scheduled to be in service by 2015 but an influential review of Nasa’s human spaceflight programme has cast doubt on its future. The Augustine panel questioned the cost, design and construction schedule of the rocket in a report submitted to the White House for consideration.

Ares is the first new design to emerge from Nasa in 30 years and is the largest ever designed and built by the space agency. The rocket used in the test flight is identical to the one Nasa hopes to use to lift astronauts into space, except for the top half, which included a dummy crew capsule and upper-stage rocket. During the flight it was estimated to have reached a speed of nearly five times the speed of sound.

Both lower and upper stages of the rocket will be retrieved by ships that will track them using radar.

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Ares 1 x Rocket,Ares 1 X Test Flight

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