NASA's
Ares Rockets
Metal has no DNA; machines have no genes. But that doesn't
mean they don't have pedigrees — ancestral lines every
bit as elaborate as our own. That's surely the case with the
Ares 1 rocket. The best and smartest and coolest thing built
in 2009 — a machine that can launch human beings to
cosmic destinations we'd never considered before — is
the fruit of a very old family tree, one with branches grand,
historic and even wicked.
There are a lot of reasons astronauts haven't moved beyond
the harbor lights of low-Earth orbit in nearly 40 years, but
one of them is that we haven't had the machines to take us
anywhere else. The space shuttle is a flying truck: fine for
the lunch-bucket work of hauling cargo a couple of hundred
miles into space, but nothing more. In 2004, however, the
U.S. committed itself to sending astronauts back to the moon
and later to Mars, and for that, you need something new and
nifty for them to fly. The answer is the Ares 1, which had
its first unmanned flight on Oct. 28 and dazzled even the
skeptics.
From a distance, the rocket is unprepossessing — a slender
white stalk that looks almost as if it would twang in the
Florida wind. But up close, it's huge: about 327 ft. (100
m) tall, or the biggest thing the U.S. has launched since
the 363-ft. (111 m) Saturn V moon rockets of the early 1970s.
Its first stage is a souped-up version of one of the shuttle's
solid-fuel rockets; its top stage is a similarly muscled-up
model of the Saturn's massive J2 engines.
If that general body plan doesn't exactly break ground, that's
the point. NASA tried breaking ground with the shuttles and
in doing so broke all the rules. Shuttle astronauts sit alongside
the fuel — next to the exploding motor that claimed
Challenger, beneath the chunks of falling foam that killed
Columbia. And when you fly a spacecraft repeatedly as opposed
to chucking it after a single use, there's a lot of wear to
repair.
When NASA engineers gathered to plan the next generation of
America's rockets, they thus decided to go back to the future
— way back. The Saturn V was the brainchild of Wernher
von Braun, the German scientist whose bright genius gave the
U.S. its finest line of rockets — and whose dark genius
gave Hitler the V2 missile that rained terror on London. Von
Braun had, in turn, drawn insights from American rocket pioneer
Robert Goddard. Goddard built on the work of 17th century
artillery innovator Kazimierz Siemienowicz, a Pole.
The Ares 1 is a worthy descendant of their rockets and others,
with lightweight composites, better engines and exponentially
improved computers giving it more reliability and power. The
Ares 1 will launch an Apollo-like spacecraft with four crew
members — perhaps by 2015. Alongside it, NASA is developing
the Brobdingnagian Ares V, a 380-ft. (116 m) behemoth intended
to put such heavy equipment as a lunar lander in Earth orbit,
where astronauts can link up with it before blasting away
to the moon. Somewhere between the two rockets is the so-called
Ares Lite — a heavy-lift hybrid that could carry both
humans and cargo and is intended to be a design that engineers
can have in their back pockets if the two-booster plan proves
unaffordable.
The new rockets could take astronauts to some thrilling places.
The biggest costs — and risks — associated with
visiting other celestial bodies are from landing and taking
off again. But suppose you don't land? An independent commission
appointed by the White House to make recommendations for NASA's
future recently returned its 154-page report and made strong
arguments for bypassing the familiar boots-in-the-soil scenario
in favor of a flexible path of flybys and orbits.
Under the new thinking, astronauts could barnstorm or circle
the moon, Mars and Mars' twin moons, deploying probes to do
their rock-collecting and experiments for them. They could
similarly sample near-Earth objects like asteroids. They could
also travel to what is known as the Lagrange points —
a scattering of spots between Earth and the moon and Earth
and the sun where the gravitational forces on the bodies are
precisely balanced and spacecraft simply ... hang where they
are. These would serve as ideal spots for deploying probes
and conducting cosmic observations.
Troublingly for Ares partisans, the same commission that called
for such creative uses for the new rockets also called into
question how affordable they are, arguing that it might be
better simply to modify boosters now used to carry satellites
and put a capsule on top. Maybe — but there's the question
of safety too. NASA designers say the Ares line will be 10
times as safe as the shuttle and two to three times as safe
as competing boosters.
There's no way of knowing if those projections are too rosy,
but if history teaches us anything, it's that the space program's
grimmest chapters — the launchpad fires and shuttle
disasters — unfold when policy planners lean too hard
on engineers. The finest moments occur when the bureaucrats
give the designers a clean sheet of drafting paper and let
them dream. There's genius in knowing how to create a truly
big invention — and there's wisdom in knowing how to
recognize it and use it.
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