NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jim Hodges

He sat on the front row of the Pearl Young Theater four hours a day for two days, alternately working a laptop computer and a cell phone.

In the end, at 11:30 Wednesday morning, he put down both and watched the screen as did about 45 others in the building, rapt at seeing history.

And, for Henry Wright, relief.

"Oh, God, yeah," said Wright, who worked with Langley's Systems Engineering and Integration effort on Ares I-X, after watching the successful flight.

Ten seconds into launch, Ares I-X leaves the pad at Kennedy Space Center en route to a six-minute trip that confirmed models and tests made by Systems Engineering and Integration people at NASA Langley. Credit: NASA

Click image to enlarge

"I feel like the world's off my shoulders," Wright added. "Just to see this day happen is tremendous. To get to this point, all of the simulations and models and everything to show us how it was going to fly, to finally see it doing what the folks intended it to do, I just can't describe the feeling."

It was easier for Marshall Smith and Jonathan Cruz to describe theirs. Smith, the SE&I chief; and Cruz, project manager for the Ares I-X crew module and launch abort system, were watching in a hangar at Kennedy Space Center.

"After (the flight) people came to me and said 'let's do it again,' " Smith said.

One of them was Cruz.

"I told him just after the first stage separated," he said, laughing.

Family issues prevented Wright from being at Kennedy for the flight, but technology kept him in contact: email, "instant message, everything," he said. "You want to know what's going on. You want to know if there's anything back here we can do to help. Even comic relief."

Wright smiled when he heard Ed Mango, launch director for Ares I-X, gave an emotional assessment to those in the control room at Kennedy, who were milling about, shaking hands and signaling success.

"Think about what you just did," Mango said. "Our first flight, and all we've been waiting for is the weather. That means you did pretty frickin' good."

Wright echoed that.

"When the weather is the only thing holding you up, that's amazing," he said in the theater.

Early assessments were that Ares I-X's systems worked as they were supposed to work, gratifying to Wright and the people with whom he worked in SE&I.

"We had so many roles," he said. "We had the sensors piece, but we also had the integrated design and analysis, defining structure loads, defining the aerodynamics, defining all of the (guidance, navigation and control) aspects. The rules that actually controlled the vehicle were generated here as part of a team with Langley and Marshall. Lockheed and some other folks as well."

They already knew that 25-30 of the more than 700 sensors didn’t work, a phenomenally small rate of failure for such a project. Those sensors took about 850 measurements, many of them thousands of time, during the six minutes from launch to splashdown in the Atlantic.

Wright watched the replay and narrated the progress of Ares I-X, noting the water vapor coming off the upper stage as it broke through the sound barrier, waiting for the powered first stage to separate from the upper stages.

When it did, he watched the upper stage separate from the lower, then go spinning downrange.

"That's about 35 miles out," he said. "(The lower stage) will land, like 140 miles out. It's at Mach 4 ½ right now and it's about 130,000."

The spin surprised some.

"We thought it would be a little more ballistic," Smith said.

Whatever its trajectory after separation, the upper portion of Ares I-X had plenty of data to offer the future.

"When we built this, we had data from Apollo that was 40 years old and data from the space shuttle," said Smith, who came aboard the project when it just about six months old.

"It has value already, and it will have value no matter what we sent into space," he said of Ares I-X and its data.

For some, it's been a three-year sprint from a blank sheet of paper to Wednesday's launch.

"I came on three years ago, a little after it started," Cruz said. "So much has gone into this, getting to this day."

It was a day that was inevitable, but one that few could focus upon.

"We could see the calendar," said Wright, who worked on the project for two years. "When you looked at the amount of work, you just never thought you could get all of it done in time."

And the work goes on, if at a slightly slower pace.

"We've got the data," Smith said. "Now we have 30-, 60- and 90-day reports to do."

That's back home where "we have to re-introduce ourselves to our families," Cruz said.

For now, though, there is a celebration.

"There are some happy folks across the agency," Wright said. "You had folks from different centers working on this. There were easily 50 people from Langley working on I-X, and 50-60 people supporting Ares I who wore two hats. It's just a tremendous day to get this up for the first time."

And not just for Smith, Cruz, Wright and the folks at SE&I.

"The center made significant contributions to today's successful flight test," said Lesa Roe, Langley's director. "They include working closely with headquarters and other center from the beginning to formulate Ares I-X. Also leading the design, fabrication, assembly of the crew module and launch abort simulators … and conducting numerous analyses, simulations and wind tunnel tests to develop the aerodynamic models and associated loads for roll-out, launch, ascent and separation."

All of those people who did all of that work and conducted all of those tests were particularly gratified when Ares I-X blasted off, tilted slightly downrange and performed perfectly Wednesday.

"You plan for all of this. You expect it to work," Smith said. "But you don't really know until you see it."

That seeing Wednesday was believing.


 
NASA Langley Research Center
Managing Editor: Jim Hodges
Executive Editor and Responsible NASA Official: H. Keith Henry
Editor and Curator: Denise Lineberry