New Orion Craft Test: Abort Motor

You know a test went well when it shot flames 100 feet into the air.

Especially when there was video of it:

That is the second (the first being back in April) test of the Orion craft's abort motor; the Orion being the successor to the Space Shuttle, and the craft that will get NASA astronauts back to the Moon (with the Altair serving as the lander).

Despite the spectacularly dangerous-looking results, the abort motor is actually a safety feature: it would direct the Orion craft away from the Ares rockets in the event of a launch malfunction.

NASA abandons accelerated Orion 2013 plan (News)

Yesterday, it was announced that NASA was abandoning its idea for an ambitious, accelerated launch of its next-gen Orion spacecraft, pushing back the date a year. While the announced launch date is March of 2015, they were hoping to get the craft up and launched as soon as 2013; now they are looking an an internal date of 2014 (with the 'announced' launch date still sitting pretty on 2015).

The Orion craft seats 4-6 astronauts (with the current Space Shuttle typically carrying 7), and is the craft planned to carry NASA's astronauts to the Moon (with Orion being launched by the Ares rockets, subsequent to a seperate launch of the lunar lander, Altair; both craft have been spotlighted here recently). Meanwhile, other nations have their own equivalents brewing...

Russian/European Joint, Manned Spacecraft Design Unveiled (News)

The replacement for the oft-used Russian Soyuz craft was unveiled today, and it is a joint project by the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency(Roscosmos):


Designed by Russian space firm RKK Energia, this is a craft planned to be used for lunar missions, effectively being the counterpart to NASA's Ares/Orion lunar-mission tag team (which I profiled briefly here at Luna C/I back in May). In NASA's case, the Ares is the launch module and the Orion the manned portion; this new craft is a manned craft, with the launch vehicle undetermined and (as noted in the linked BBC news article) possibly being either an entirely new vehicle or a modified existing Russian rocket.

The Russian-European plans to collaborate are not a set-in-stone agreement, and so the ESA does have a backup plan to continue should the partnership with Roscosmos fall through. Still, it's promising to see signs of this sort of high-level collaboration working, as opposed to, say, tense and outright competition that could lead to cynical (perhaps silly?) 'war in space' scenarios. In my view, if there's a time for humanity to start moving on from the more petty social-geopolitical problems of Earth, this is it. Do we really need to go start churning out terms like "lunapolitical conflict"?

But, for the time being, we have developments like this tentative Euro-Russian agreement (and other cooperation efforts) to nudge things towards what I see, at least for now, as a positive direction.

Picture of the Week: What's in a Name?

That is the vessel with which NASA's Constellation astronauts will launching efforts towards the Moon, and eventually, Mars. The Ares rocket, with Ares I carrying the crew and Ares V carrying the cargo, is the first replacement for the Space Shuttle (which launched both cargo and crew at once). The Ares is the launch vehicle, with the spacecraft per se being the Orion.

Ares, the god, interestingly is (as Wikipedia puts it): "...more accurately the god of savage warfare, or bloodlust, or slaughter personified". Lovely. I perhaps might have chosen a, ah...more diplomatic name for the vehicle launching our space efforts, though the choice technically comes from Ares' Roman alter ego/incarnation: Mars, the warrior god, a form in which he was more honored in society (second only to Jupiter, in fact). Fun fact: the month of March is named after Mars.

Hopefully our efforts on the Moon and Mars have a lot more truth and introspection than bloodlust and slaughter personifed ("That's no moon...").