Afishionados,

The Ares I-X Launches! Photo © NASA

Today was a historical day, yet few people seem to realize it. NASA successfully launched the Ares I-X rocket this morning, which is set to replace the aging [read: old as FUCK] space shuttle, due to be retired in 2010. NASA hopes the Ares I, along with the Ares V, will take astronauts back to the moon and beyond sometime around 2015.

I was at Sterling & Cooper when the launch occurred, but thankfully NASA had a QuickTime stream of it that I could watch for free. Miss Holloway and I watched together. She sat on my lap the whole time. When asked what her favorite part about the whole thing was, Miss Holloway said, “I like all the thrust.”

NASA had attempted to launch the Ares I-X yesterday morning, but poor weather conditions forced a scrub. The launch was rescheduled for today at 8:00 A.M. ET, so of course it was launched today around 11:30 A.M. It was amazing, and I wish I could have been there to see it in person instead of a rather crappy QuickTime stream.

The Ares I-X in the Air Photo © NASA

The entire mission lasted only a few minutes, which is more than I can say for some people and their rockets who are more likely to explode before they even get up. To my knowledge, the Ares I-X was a huge success with no failures. Unfortunately, the video stream I watched did not show the parachutes and splashdown, though NASA claims that even the recovery went as expected. Hopefully more details are released as data from the mission is gathered and analyzed.

A View from Above. Photo © NASA. Video © CNN. Click to play.

For those of you who missed the launch, I have shamelessly pilfered the footage from CNN’s web site and reposted it here for your viewing pleasure. CNN’s video is much better quality than was NASA’s live stream. The colors and pixelation aren’t near as bad. NASA can land men on the moon and rovers on Mars, but they can’t stream an HD feed, apparently.

Now that Ares I-X has proven successful, I look forward to future launches and further developments with NASA’s Constellation program. I don’t know if today’s successful mission means Ares gets to lose its “X” designation or not, but hopefully we’re one step closer, if not a giant leap. I also hope that today’s mission persuades the Obama administration to keep funding the program so that it doesn’t suffer the same fate as Apollo. One of these days, Ares, BANG, ZOOM! To the moon!

"Norton, we have a problem."

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Awesome, Current Events, Great Ideas, News, Science, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.