20 whole seconds before ignition, the test was scrubbed due to something going wrong with the TVC (thrust vector control) system that controls the nozzle. Test to be rescheduled for a later date.
There were a *lot* of people out there today. Hard to get photographic evidence for that, given the planar nature of the area; but a helicopter looking down would see a whole lot of cars and people baking their asses off in the heat of a cloudless August day in the Utah desert. Whoever was selling the Pepsi probably made a freakin’ fortune.
This is the test stand and motor through my telephoto lens:
A view down the highway. This density of parking went on for at least a mile in either direction, and was the least of the parking options.
A panoramic view of the crowd. While not a whole lot of people are visible… trust me, beyond the portapotties, there was an *army* of annoyed visitors.
Oh, and by the way, ya mooches: If you like this sort of hard-hitting reporting and/or the other stuff I post, you can support the cause by Buying My Stuff, which includes aerospace drawings and documents, as well as the journal of unbuilt aircraft and spacecraft projects, Aerospace Projects Review.
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Mommacat on the march.
8 Responses to “Well, THAT was a bust”
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So, two test delays so far… this _really_ is Shuttle derived, isn’t it? 😉
The head of the Ares Project Office, Steve Cook, just resigned: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=32169
Ares appears to be the walking dead anyway so he may as well move on to greener pastures I suppose.
One of my brothers works at Stennis, currently still working on the Shuttle Engine Maintenance program, last I talked to him. He says that new test stand construction is moving right along, and he has been “queried” about shifting over to ARES or another program. He is one of those anal-retentive perfectionists that the space programs love to find!
As a kid he had his tool box, and everything had its place AND was in it, which carried on into his Air Force time, which was as a C 17 crewman/crew chief with lots of extra “edumacation”.
With DIRECTv3 tauting itself as “safer, simpler, and sooner,” and mostly based on on tried and true components borrowed from STS, engineering actually done by NASA, and coming in at around 60% of the cost of Project Constellation, both up front and long term, it just doesn’t make sense, particularly in today’s economy, to go with an expensive and unproven Lamborghini when an identically capable Ford can be built using current components.
>it just doesn’t make sense, particularly in today’s economy…
…to “waste money in yet another pointless moon-mission boondoggle.” I expect to see Ares/Orion/Constellation all cancelled shortly, with some hare-brained notion of extending Shuttle even further. Soon enough the Shuttle will end, and that will be essentially that for manned American spaceflight, unless the likes of SpaceX and Rutan can pull it out.
“For the children,” you understand.
Mommacat in “Resevoir Cats”
[…] had a successful Ares 1 motor test, unlike two weeks ago. It was a somewhat more minimalist affair… the big display model was gone, there were fewer […]