NASA launches Ares I-X rocket

Source: cnn

NASA launched its Ares I-X rocket Wednesday, after multiple delays over two days because of bad weather.

The rocket took off at 11:30 a.m. ET, 30 minutes before a noon deadline for the launch.

The unmanned Ares I-X is a part of the Constellation Program. The program has been developing new vehicles to replace space shuttles, which will be phased out in 2010.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/10/28/nasa.ares.rocket/index.html

I love these launches

:woohoo:

We are on our way to a new generation of exploration! Those of us here are so delighted at the success of the Ares 1=X. Hope our space program picks up again, at least we have hope!

As a space geek, I love this kind of stuff!! I have to say, however, that I laugh at how NASA is pushing the idea that we need this rocket to help in case we are in danger of getting hit by an asteroid in a few years; Terror, Terror, Terror has become Hit, Hit, Hit. Well, I can't say I am unhappy with making the worse case scenario for funding this, just wish we didn't have to do that. Then again...maybe we are in danger...damn, we need the Ares!

"The Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome. Yet one more reason why using fear to rule people is a bad thing, eh?

Unfortunately, asteroids are one of the few things that could actually do us in as opposed to, say, OMG TERRORISM, but it wouldn't cost much to stop them as long as we have a good, long lead time and as long as we have a good understanding of what their internal composition is.

To put the price of things in context, we currently spend around 2 million dollars a year on Space Watch to search for potentially hazardous Near Earth Objects, which is only 2 times as much as Joe Lieberman got from insurance companies for his re-election campaign. Put another way, it is about 1/250,000 of the defense budget.

Forty, fifty years, something like that. Nothing comes of it because people like to equate "unlikely to happen" with "never ever ever ever going to happen."

We will get beaned by one sooner or later. Anyone who says otherwise is flatly, objectively wrong. I don't believe most people will be willing to spend a dime on asteroid defense until a city in the developed world is destroyed by one (or we have a closer call than what happened over Indonesia around October 8), but I'm utterly convinced that it's entirely necessary that people put at least some energy into that sort of thing.

The fact that they're talking it up more now that there are actually occasionally people who believe that NASA deserves a real budget has nothing to do with the Bush-era terrorism wankfest.

Of course, the vast majority of talk I've heard about the Ares is simply about getting people and objects back up there. NASA isn't talking about it primarily in terms of asteroid defense.

I watched it from the NASA TV feed at www.nasa.gov.

I' very curious to see how they design these.

...very much like the old Apollo. just bigger really.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/index.html

Thanks for the thread, whopis01.

The Ares I isn't meant to get astronauts to the moon. It's meant to shuttle them to low earth orbit where they'll rendezvous with the craft that will take them to the Moon. The Ares V is the real "Moon rocket."