credit: NASA
According to NASA Ares projects office manager Steve Cook the Ares I crew launch vehicle's bending moments issue is one of the controversial rocket's myths, well make your own mind up with this NASA animation of the Ares I-X test flight's dynamics
Click through to the extended portion of this blog to see the animation
After this week's run of NASA Constellation programme blog posts expect a return to a mixed bag of subjects from Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo's interior to ESA's experimental re-entry vehicles next week
The bending and other elastic transformations are always greatly exaggerated in these illustrations, so one can not make much judgement of the video.
"make your own mind up with this NASA animation of the Ares I-X test flight's dynamics"
Well, the bottom right screen says "20X" and I don't know what units or values are depicted by the colors... are those millimeters, inches?? It's definitely buffeting around but is it outside of the allowed envelope? Very cool video but this armchair engineer can't call yay or nay on this.
I really don't understand all the doom and gloom on the ares rockets. Griffin has perfectly explained the case for these rockets. His words are some of the clearest i've ever read, surpassed only by Spock "himself." Nothing is perfect, life isn't fair and Griffin has perfectly explained the situation he is working with, e.g., minimizing loss of NASA workforce, budgets, going with shuttle derived to keep a lot of our existing manufacturing infrastructure. We're getting the Ares V which out performs the Saturn V by 40%!!! That blows my mind and I could not be happier... well, unless they of course they decided they wanted to make it even bigger. The stick... well, I hope they can overcome the engineering challenges but I don't feel any fundamental problem with the design.
I just hope that the "bending" issues are just rumors, because if it results in another failed launch (think Columbia), then Congress is going to fire (or pressure the President to do so) all of the execs (which will delay America's return to the moon).
Yes but - has the deflection been exaggerated in the lower right hand screen, as is often done in structural dynamics animations like this?
Even if it hasn't been, the deflection is not much worse than watching the wing tip on any recent Boeing product during turbulence. (Although at slightly different altitudes and Mach numbers)
You can't tell much from this animation for the reasons stated in the other comments. But, then we won't learn much from the ARES-1X test either, as it is a hoked up rocket unlike the real ARES-1. Its a four segment SRB with a stiff inert fifth, a stiff, inert, non-sloshing upper stage, and a stiff, inert launch abort tower. Nothing like the real thing at all...won't even suffer from thrust oscillation.