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13-03-09 NASA Drops 50,000-pound Dummy Rocket on Arizona

NASA and the U.S. Air Force managed to drop a 50,000-pound rocket booster on the Arizona desert.Well,it was a sort of a crash test dummy.But the 25-ton heft was real.As hoped,a parachute opened and the booster set down intact.The drop was a test of the next-generation rocket called Ares,designed to get the space agency,and some astronauts,back to the moon."NASA's new Ares moon rocket is going to have a reusable booster stage that we plan to recover after each mission," explains James Burnum of Marshall Space Flight Center. "To 'catch' the booster before it crashes back to Earth,we need a super-reliable parachute system."Dropping something so big is not simple.In fact it doesn't always go well.Last year,a mock-up of NASA's Orion space shuttle successor twisted,tumbled and fell from thousands of feet up after a parachute failed to inflate properly.The recent test,conducted Feb. 28 near Yuma,went off without any disasters,according to a NASA statement today."We flew at 175 knots at 25,000 feet,and dropped one of the heaviest payloads a C-17 has ever carried – a 50,000-pound stand-in for the spent Ares booster," said chief pilot Frank Batteas of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center."A lot of things have to happen correctly for such a test to be successful."The Ares booster recovery parachute system consists of a small pilot chute,which pulls out the drogue chute,and three main parachutes