Sunday, November 01, 2009

Ares

Ares I is the 94 m highcrew launch vehicle being developed by NASA as a component of the Constellation Program. It will bring people to the ISS and the Moon (and maybe Mars). The first mission to the Moon is planned in 2019.

The unmanned Ares V, is the cargo launch vehicle. It is more powerfull than Saturn V.

Here is a comparison in height with, the space shuttle, and Saturn V,

Ares I (the first stage) was successfully test launched on October 28,


I hope they have learned a lot from the expensive space shuttle.

4 comments:

cybrbeast said...

The Ares V can bring as much cargo to LEO as the Saturn V.
It can bring a lot more to the moon though.
This just seems like and upgraded Saturn V, and a really expensive upgrade at that.
Also the parachutes failed on this mission, but that was not a critical part of the mission so it didn't matter.

I think NASA should have listened to some of their own engineers and gone with the DIRECT program, which would be a lot more economical and quicker to implement.

Still, it is a pretty rocket though.

annom said...

Ares V can bring 80,000 kg more to LEO than Saturn V, according to wiki.

It is nothing very new and basically a redesign of the Space Shuttle launcher. They could have used the current Space Shuttle launcher (without the spacecraft) to save a lot in development costs. I'm not too excited about this design, but it's the only new thing we have.

They should use Ares V to launch a submarine to Europa!

It's good they don't use a winged spaceplane with payload bay and engines for re-entry anymore. Waste of mass.
Apollo re-entered 7,000 kg, the Space Shuttle at least 70,000 kg.

cybrbeast said...

Oops, I misread the numbers in the wiki :)
Still, they could have saved a lot of money for other projects by going the DIRECT way.

annom said...

Yes.