Space Station Threshold

When the Constellation Program is completed, we'll have a brand new generation of rocket design (Ares) and a hi-tech space ship (Orion). It only seems fair that we should also have a new kind of emergency mechanism that will carry the crew to safety should a problem during launch threaten the astronauts. Enter the Constellation Launch [...]

There's been a lot of bad news surrounding the development of the Constellation Program of late. We've had news of general design flaws, rebelling NASA engineers, failed parachute tests, budget overruns, vibrational issues and job losses. Now we have a new one to add to the mix, the Ares I launch vehicle could bump into [...]

NASA scientists currently working on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle had the rare opportunity to unpack a little piece of history. A visit to Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum led them to uncover crates containing the heat shields used during the development of the Apollo Program, some 35 years ago. The shielding has ...

According to an internal email, NASA staff have been instructed to initiate a study into extending the operational lifetime of the Shuttle to bridge the 5-year gap between planned Shuttle retirement and Constellation commencement. In an apparent U-turn in the US space agency's policy, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has ordered a ...

There's a big problem with Kennedy Space Center playing host to the Constellation Program: The heavy-lift rocket, Ares V, may be too heavy for the infrastructure to cope with. The crawlerway is a 40 year old road designed for the Saturn V (Apollo Program) crawler-transporters and is currently used to carry the Shuttle up to [...]

As previously reported on the Universe Today, recent parachute test-drops for the Constellation Project have brought mixed results. The Ares I drogue parachute test appeared to perform flawlessly on July 24th, but the July 31st Orion test drop was a different story. Very early on in the parachute test, the "programmer parachute" (the ...

NASA will add a system engineers equated to shock absorbers to Ares 1 rockets to reduce significant vibrations that could shake Orion spacecraft and astronaut crews during early stages of the flight. Earlier, engineers had determined that at about 115 seconds into the flight, the Ares rocket would vibrate for about 5 seconds, enough [...]

NASA is debating whether the new Orion capsule should land in the water, like Apollo, or on land, similar to how the Russian Soyuz capsule returns to Earth. To help them determine the potential for human injuries with each possible landing scenario, NASA has used human cadavers during their tests. At first, this [...]

On the heels of news about NASA engineers who feel the Constellation program is using the wrong kind of rockets comes word that efforts to build the spacecraft which will replace the shuttle and return astronauts to the moon is running behind and over-budget. NASA Watch published a leaked internal NASA document showing the [...]

There's a group of NASA engineers who believe NASA is making a mistake with its new Constellation program to return to the moon, which will use the new Ares rockets for launches starting in 2014. Constellation is an all new program which requires everything to be built from the ground up. The group [...]