ATK successfully tests safety component

The status of U.S. space exploration might be up in the air for the new U.S. president, but the engineering and ground tests for NASA's Constellation moon and Mars shuttle replacement program seem to be working just fine.

Development of NASA's next-generation crew launch vehicle, the Ares I rocket, took another step forward this past Friday when Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, successfully tested at its Promontory facility a critical crew safety mechanism.

Friday's test, the third in just over two months, was part of sub- and full-scale launching pad tryouts that scientists and engineers must cross off their list prior to the trial liftoff of the Ares I-X rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida later this year.

NASA's deputy project chief Stephen Gaddis told the newspaper after a safety component test at Promontory this past November that each test is a literal signal that a new era of space exploration has begun, and how far it goes with a new Congress and administration remains to be seen.

This past Friday's test means — at least as far as the technology and machinery are concerned — the stage is closer to being set for the Orion vehicle, an Apollo look-alike crew capsule that is to sit atop the Ares I, for flights to the International Space Station in 2015, back to the moon by 2020, and eventually to Mars and beyond.

ATK's work has focused on an abort mechanism that will push the spacecraft's crew to safety in the event of an emergency on the launch pad or during the initial ascent phase. Doing so requires 500,000 pounds of force in about five seconds — burning 4,000 pounds of rocket fuel and creating 16 times the G-force of Earth's normal gravity — that will in effect make the capsule jump out of the way of the main booster rockets and parachute safely back to Earth.

"The past 12 months has been a historical year for ATK as we successfully completed many firsts in the development of Ares I and the launch abort system for Orion," Mike Kahn, ATK general manager, said Friday.

As the testing continues, the parameters of a different but vital part of the program are also being set — the level of commitment in Congress and the Obama administration to the Constellation shuttle replacement program.

In a statement released Thursday in honor of astronauts killed in the pursuit of space exploration, the new president mentioned "journeys," "frontiers" and "the future" but didn't mention space at all except for invoking it in the acronym — "NASA's role is to pioneer journeys into the unknown."