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Seems there’s very little good fortune around for NASA’s aging space shuttles these days. With recent flights to the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station (ISS) beset by problems, an Atlantis mission scheduled for November has been delayed in favour of a test launch of the Ares rocket that will soon replace the shuttle fleet.
Ares given a little more space on the launch calendar. Image: NASA.
Originally expected to blast off towards the orbiting ISS on November 12, the Atlantis space shuttle’s departure has now been shunted to November 16 in order to provide a little more calendar-based margin for error for the launch of NASA’s experimental Ares 1-X rocket.
NASA’s decision to extend the viable flight window of its October 27 test flight could likely be a consequence of problematic delays suffered by the last two shuttle launches, both of which were repeatedly grounded due to technical malfunctions and inclement weather conditions around the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Pencilled in to complete a slow crawl to its Florida launch pad on Tuesday, October 20, the Ares 1-X will eventually take to the skies filled with sensors and dummy components (including a mock-up of the Orion crew capsule) as an unmanned test that NASA will use to gather data on various flight characteristics.
Set to arrive as the first major new spacecraft produced by NASA in almost 30 years, the Ares rocket has received some $445 million USD in funding and is an integral part of NASA’s Constellation program, which aims to replace the space shuttle fleet and carry the U.S. space program into the future.
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