The Ares I-X Leaves The VAB In Less Than A Week

By Wes Oleszewski

Although the high bay doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center can be opened for roll-outs of the Space Shuttle, it's been three and a half decades since they had to be opened all the way to allow a launch vehicle roll out.  March 24, 1975, was the last time that the doors of the VAB had to be fully opened to allow the passage of a launch vehicle, and that vehicle was the last of its kind ever to fly. Designated AS-210, it was the Saturn IB launch vehicle for the Apollo Soyuz Test Project, and mounted on its milk stool launch platform, the tip of the AS-210's escape tower reached the same 363 foot mark as the Saturn V moon rocket. Along with the associated Launch Umbilical Tower, the entire stack required all of the VAB's high bay number 1 doors to be fully opened in order to allow the vehicle to be transported to Launch Complex 39B.

AS-210 NASA Photo

In less than a week, the doors of high bay number 3 of the VAB will have to yawn wide open once again, this time to allow the 327 foot tall Ares I-X to leave the building. First motion is planned for 0001 on October 20th. Just like AS-210, the destination for the Ares I-X will be Launch Complex 39B, but this time the vehicle will be the first of its kind rather than the last.

Components for the Ares I-X began arriving at the VAB a year ago. Since then the Ares I-X team has been busy doing far more than simply stacking the vehicle. Since this test vehicle represents a totally new flight configuration, an encyclopedia's worth of procedures had to written and amended as the process went along. Handling procedures for each individual component ... from the smallest bolt and washer to the largest section of the Ares I adapter ... had to be composed, tested, and then recomposed. Each step was critical, as future versions of this vehicle will be carrying astronauts.

Objectives of the highly instrumented Ares I-X vehicle include conducting a flight staging and separation between a single SRB  first stage and an Ares I upper stage, active the control of a vehicle that is similar to the Ares  I, verifying vehicle computer modeling of roll during first stage boost and evaluate  first stage reentry and recovery characteristics and procedures. Additionally there is a laundry list of secondary items that the test flight will explore and resolve. The Ares I-X is far from being "the world's biggest model rocket." In fact, it is scientific test bed that will serve to confirm or dispel volumes of computer modeling data.

NASA Photo

Aside from the official objectives, the Ares I-X is also a one of a kind launch vehicle. It is historic in the fact that it represents the current, funded, Program of Record and as such also represents the future path of the United States human space effort. In an era when the roll out of a Space Shuttle is thought of as so commonplace that not even NASA TV will broadcast the entire event, the roll out of the Ares I-X  also represents a single event in spaceflight history that no true space buff will want to miss.

FMI: www.nasa.gov