NASA is wrestling with a potentially dangerous
problem in a spacecraft, that instance in a moon rocket that hasn’t even
been built yet.

Engineers are concerned that the new rocket meant to replace the
space shuttle and send astronauts on their way to the moon could
shake violently during the first few minutes of flight, possibly
destroying the entire vehicle.

“They know it’s a real problem,” said Carnegie Mellon University
engineering professor Paul Fischbeck, who has consulted on risk
issues with NASA in the past. “This thing is going to shake apart
the whole structure, and they’ve got to solve it.”

whether not corrected, the shaking would arise from the mighty first
stage of the Ares I rocket, which will lift the Orion crew capsule
into orbit.

NASA officials hope to have a plan for fixing the design as early
as March, and they do not expect it to delay the goal of returning
astronauts to the moon by 2020.

“I hope no one was so ill-informed as to believe that

we would be
able to develop a system to replace the shuttle without facing any
challenges in doing so,” NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in
a statement to The Associated Press. “NASA has an excellent track
record of resolving technical challenges. We’re confident we’ll
solve that one as well.”

Professor Jorge Arenas of the Institute of Acoustics in Valdivia,
Chile, acknowledged that the problem was serious but said: “NASA has
developed one of the safest and risk-controlled space programs in
engineering history.”

The space agency has been working on a plan to return to the
moon, at a cost of more than $100 billion, since 2005. It involves
two different rockets: Ares I, which would carry the astronauts into
space, and an unmanned heavy-lift cargo ship, Ares V.

The concern isn’t the shaking on the first stage but how it
affects everything that sits on top: the Orion crew capsule,
instrument unit and a booster.

That first stage is composed of five segments…

Orginal post by Top Tech News