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Check out how good the camera technology has gotten for tracking a rocket booster all the way to 150,000 feet and back to the ocean. This high-definition video was taken during NASA’s Ares 1-X launch on October 28, 2009, with a gyro-stabilized camera on board a Cessna Skymaster purring along at 12,000 feet above the Atlantic near the splashdown area. Rather watch the un-narrated version? Click here for the same video, which features a moment at the 3:50 mark where the booster’s tumble produces a cool shockwave. For some reason, that was cropped from the narrated version.

Score one for the rocket engineers.

To quote Ed Mango, the launch director for today’s Ares I-X rocket test, his team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center did a “frickin’ fantastic” job on their first outing, which gathered data for the designers of NASA’s proposed Ares 1 crew launcher. It appears the engineers got all the information they needed, and everything went smoothly. “The team is tired, but extremely satisfied,” said NASA Constellation program manager Jeff Hanley.

Good for them. They needed a win. It can’t be easy working on Ares these days, not with the big, black cloud hanging over the program’s head. Kennedy center director Bob Cabana referred to “the naysayers” during his post-launch congratulatory speech. Man, does he have that right.

Norman Augustine and his Presidentially-appointed panel on the future of human spaceflight didn’t question the Ares rocket’s technical soundness so much as its very purpose. When the program started, NASA hoped Ares 1 would be flying by 2012, soon enough to ferry astronauts to the space station shortly after the shuttle retires. Now, several budget cuts later, the agency says Ares can’t fly until 2015. The Augustine committee (based on an independent assessment by the Aerospace Corporation) predicts it will be two years later than that.

Most advocates of human space exploration hope that by 2017 a commercial launcher will come along that can beat Ares’ predicted high price. According to the data on page 16 of this presentation, Ares 1 will cost $13.5 billion to build and $557 million per launch, at the rate of two flights a year. That doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over the space shuttle, which was widely criticized as being too expensive.

Ah well. That argument is for another day, and I feel a bit churlish raining on the Ares 1-X parade when they’ve already seen enough clouds for one day. So congratulations, folks. That was frickin’ fantastic.

…But not necessarily in that order, when you’re dealing with the world’s largest solid rocket motor. In fact, engineers who tried last Thursday to light the ATK five-segment motor planned for NASA’s Ares I rocket, were in an underground bunker half a mile away when ignition was to occur at a quarter past 1:00 in the afternoon (15 minutes past the planned time). I was standing above ground about a mile away under a brilliant Utah sun with temperatures in the mid-90s and the wind blowing away from us. This was to be the first static firing of the five-segment booster derived from the space shuttle’s twin, four-segment boosters. The new booster will loft NASA astronauts to orbit after the shuttle retires.

Instead, a hold was called with just 20 seconds to go, and an announcer shortly informed a crowd of 50 journalists and 500-plus NASA and ATK brass assembled at Promontory, Utah, two hours northwest of Salt Lake City, that the test was canceled. The problem was a faulty valve that feeds an auxiliary power unit that spools up a few tens of seconds prior to ignition and drives a hydraulic system in the booster’s aft skirt that gimbals the exhaust nozzle, which is how the rocket steers itself in flight. It was a critical part of the test, as engineers were going to run the nozzle, which is 18 inches longer than a shuttle booster nozzle, through some vigorous motions to see how it holds up under 24 percent more thrust than that produced by a shuttle booster.

In the press conference an hour later, one journalist asked a slightly weary-looking Pat Lampton, NASA’s chief engineer on the program, about all the “bureaucrats” who would be involved in the Monday-morning quarterbacking. He calmly replied, “Fortunately, at NASA, most of the bureaucrats are engineers.”

What it should have looked like. Photo: ATK

By 5:00, ATK dashed any remaining hopes for a test the next day. There were plenty of murmurs throughout the press corps about the timing of the test: A matter of days before the Augustine panel’s end-of-the-month  deadline to the White House, with a printed report ready by late September. The panel’s conclusions were becoming an open secret: Not only will NASA’s paltry 18-billion-dollar budget fail to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, but we may need a cheaper rocket, such as Elon Musk’s Falcon Nine, or Deltas and Atlases that have been building a strong record lofting satellites. That’s not what NASA and ATK want to hear after developing Ares I for the past five years.

As luck would have it, the space shuttle Discovery blasted off the next day, just before midnight on the 28th. On the 29th, ATK distributed a press release stating, “More than 100 RSRM (reusable solid rocket motor) flight sets have been launched to date, marking a two-decade track record of flawless performance.” Blake Larson, ATK Space Systems President, was quoted in the release, saying, “The launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery and the upcoming fall launch of the Ares I-X [a four-segment booster topped by a fifth empty segment], highlight the capabilities and progress ATK and NASA have made in developing the most reliable and affordable family of solid rocket motors ever produced….They will continue to be instrumental to the success of the remaining shuttle flights as well as the future human spaceflight programs.”

Earlier that day, we’d been piled into a bus and carted up the hill for a closeup look at the 12-foot-diameter, 154-foot-long booster, bolted horizontally to the ground for the static test. These ground connections keep it still while the real anchor, a house-size block of concrete weighing several million pounds, endures 3.6 million pounds of thrust via an Erector-Set-like assembly of steel beams sandwiched between the nose of the motor and the concrete. We wouldn’t have seen the rocket move forward, but it would have, about an inch at most points along its frame. If that flex weren’t designed in, the motor might rip itself apart. Its five reusable segments are durable—they’ve flown in space a total of 48 times. The rear segment flew on the very first shuttle mission in April 1981.

Twenty yards behind the exhaust cone, a mirror roughly eight feet square awaited obliteration atop a metal pole that emerged from its own block of concrete set firmly in the ground. Cameras forward of the motor are pointed at the mirror and record the first milliseconds of the ignition as the gases roar out the nozzle. Milliseconds later, the mirror gets annihilated, its pole and concrete pedestal uprooted and flung 50 yards up the barren hill where others lay after earlier tests. A large, foil-wrapped swing arm with a CO2 delivery system stood ready to insert a probe into the nozzle immediately after the test to cool the motor’s interior. This substitutes for frigid altitude and seawater that cools an operational booster. A six-inch blanket of gray sand covered the entire concrete terrace behind the motor. Some of the sand would be blown up onto the hillside, but much of it would remain and turn to glass in the 6,000-degree heat.

All I saw on Thursday was the sleeping rocket, not the one belching fire and smoke. I was still impressed. This hydraulic glitch had not caused a scrub of a static test or a shuttle launch that anyone could remember. Murphy’s Law had followed me to Utah.

But I had to remind myself that the one shuttle launch I’ve witnessed, a night launch with a full moon hanging above the Atlantic in a cloudless November sky, had gone off without a problem. I’ll admit, I’d rather see the shuttle fly any day than a rocket motor chained to the desert floor.

Is the Saturn V’s F-1, first-stage engine more power than you need? Then consider the NK-33, the smaller first-stage engine from the only other moon rocket ever built by the human race.

The Soviet N1 lunar rocket, which experienced four failed launches from 1969 to 1972, was a firebreathing behemoth belching out 9.666 million pounds of thrust at launch—about three million more than that of the Saturn V—thanks to a cluster of 30 NK-33s that burned, like the F-1, kerosene and liquid oxygen.

The last of those flights was the most successful. It ran smoothly for 106 seconds and reached 25 miles altitude before an oxygen pump explosion triggered disintegration of the rocket.

The NK-33 kicked out 339,000 pounds of thrust, about 125 times its weight.

Aerojet's AJ26-NK33A variant of the NK-33.

But with the cancellation of the program, orders came down to destroy the remaining NK-33s. Nikolay Kuznetsov, who headed the Kuznetsov Design Bureau that produced the NK-33 at a plant in Samara, in the Volga region, risked his neck when he disobeyed that order and squirreled away some unused engines in an underground storage locale for more than 20 years. When they reappeared, they were in such good shape that they needed very little updating to become flight ready. Rocketplane Kistler, Aerojet, and Orbital Sciences have been modifying the NK-33 for use in the U.S. market, and talks are afoot for a joint venture to continue producing the little rocket that could.

It’s probably premature to declare SpaceX an established launch company on the basis of yesterday’s successful orbiting of Malaysia’s Razaksat satellite (see video below). I doubt they’ll want to gloat too long, given the technical and financial risks inherent in the rocket business, and the difficult road ahead. Still, Elon Musk and crew must be feeling pretty good right now.

In seven years, SpaceX has grown from a dream to a growing company with 800 employees, major NASA contracts, and a busy launch schedule. Next up is the debut of the larger Falcon 9 rocket—not from the tiny Kwajalein range in the remote Pacific, but from the big boy launch site, Cape Canaveral.

This presentation by Musk last month to the Augustine commission on the future of the space program gives a pretty good idea where SpaceX is headed.