NASA declares Ares I-X test a success

WWIII

Time for a new world war so the US can steal some new technology again I guess. But the question is. Who are they going go to war against to get better rocket tech? Well at this point any country will do me thinks.

NASA Rocket science like 1935

Not fast enough

I mean, one rocket test every three years!? Not the NASA that put a man on the moon "before the end of the decade". Apollo 8, 9, 10 and 11 all happened in 8 months.

I'm complaining because at this rate I'll be dead before NASA get around to doing anything new and interesting. Come on, there's oceans of methane out there waiting to be the solution to the oil shortage. All we have to do is get up there and collect it! Pedal faster fool!

Re: lost 80 seconds of data...

So...Aliens use basic Latin script then?

Success?

Hmm if NASA ever go into the space tourism business, remind me not to use them - I'm not sure I like their crteria of "success".

One would have assumed that the mission must must be accomplished according to the flight plan for the notion of "Success" to apply, not just "It didn't CATO therefore we succeeded".

Think I'll take my chances with the Ruskies.

How many feet per second...

was it travelling when it hit the ocean? And how many poundals of force were their parachutes expecting?

When will NASA welcome our new SI unit overlords?

Next launch in less than 3 years

Have they (slightly) sped up the programm then? I thought the next was scheduled for 2014 at the earliest

NASA seems to have been given a confidence boost and is moving into high gear*

*High gear for NASA that is.

Obvious success

It was bound to succeed. They took some well-tried components that individually worked and put them together (shuttle, saturn v) - to obviously it would work. Much like peanut butter works, jelly works, put them together and you get peanut butter jelly. It just works (with a baseball bat)

Beagle

It crashed into the sea and it was still more successful than Beagle II. Oh wait, Beagle would have crashed into the sea if there were any left on Mars.

@Annihilator

It was bound to succeed

Not entirely, although they certainly stacked the deck pretty heavily.

Dummy 2nd stage, dummy 5th segment is fairly timid and should not have been expected to cause too many problems. However the high length to diameter ratio (relative to recent vehicles) would be a concern. Changes of diameter going down the vehicle can cause trouble as you go through the sound barrier and the down played but pretty important changes to the grain (the shape of the hole cut through the solid propellant to profile its chamber pressure) are AFAIK still pretty difficult to model by CFD. Oh and the parachutes would have to be scaled up as I don't think the SRB casing could take the impact caused by the increased impact velocity generated by a 20% increase (1 segment) in the mass.

In what seems to modern NASA's SOP its a dummy 2nd stage on top of a shuttle SRB with a dummy 5 segment.

Except it's completely different.

Which well tried components from the Saturn V were you thinking of?