New Operations Office To Open At KSC

NASA is planning to open a small office at Kennedy Space Center to start preparing to operate Ares 1 rockets and Orion spacecraft once they have been designed, built and delivered to the nation's primary spaceport.

NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate will stand up the office by the end of the year. It's unclear how many NASA managers and engineers will work in the organization, but it won't be a lot of people.

"It's still real early in the planning stages," said KSC spokesman Allard Beutel. "But it's not going to be a large number. It's not going to be dozens."

NASA's Project Constellation, which is based at Johnson Space Center in Houston, is developing the Ares 1 rocket and Apollo-style Orion space capsules for missions to return American astronauts to the moon by 2020.

The first piloted flight is targeted for March 2015, and the new office at KSC will be setting the stage to prepare for ground processing, launch operations and sustaining engineering once the Ares and Orion are operational.

The Ares 1 will be a two-stage rocket topped by an Orion capsule and its launch abort system -- a tractor motor system that would pull the Orion spacecraft off the Ares rocket in the event of an inflight explosion or other emergency.

The first stage of the vehicle will be a five-segment solid rocket booster derived from the four-segment motors that help propel shuttles into orbit. The second stage will be powered by a J2X engine -- an upgraded version of the J2 engines that powered the second stages of Saturn 5 moon rockets.

The new office will lay plans to stack the Ares 1 rockets in the KSC Vehicle Assembly Building and integrate the Orion spacecraft and its abort system with the launch vehicle.

The final assembly and integration of the Orion spacecraft will be performed at the KSC Operations & Checkout Building, and the rocket and spacecraft will be joined in the VAB.

The fully assembled vehicle and its launch gantry will be rolled out atop a mobile launcher platform to KSC's pad 39A for launch.

IMAGE NOTE: Click to enlarge and save the NASA artist's concept of an Ares 1 rocket stacked inside the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building. Then click the enlarged image to get an even bigger view of the rocket.