WASHINGTON --
NASA has signed a $1.2 billion contract
with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne to develop the
J-2X engine the U.S. space agency needs to power the upper stages of its Ares 1 crew launch
vehicle and Ares 5 heavy-lift
rocket.
Pratt &
Whitney Rocketdyne of Canoga Park, Calif., has been working
on the engine, an updated version of the Apollo-heritage J-2, since June 2006
under a temporary contract awarded without a competition. That contract called for
the company to start work on five development versions of the engine followed
by two certification engines.
With the
new contract, NASA has added one additional development engine to its order,
for a total of eight.
"This is
huge," Scott Horowitz, chief of NASA's Exploration Systems Directorate, said
during a July 16 teleconference with reporters about the new contract. "It's a big deal that we now have the
J-2X contract signed and ready to go because it's a big piece in getting this
rocket ready to fly."
NASA's Ares
1 rocket is a
two-stage booster designed to launch NASA's capsule-based space shuttle
successor - the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle - into low-Earth orbit. The
larger Ares 5, meanwhile, is slated to haul heftier payloads into
space such as lunar landers and other hardware. Both
the Ares 1 and Ares 5 rockets will
rely on J-2X engines to power their second stages. NASA plans to award a
separate contract down the road for the production of engines for operational
missions.
Mike Kynard, NASA's J-2X program manager, told reporters that buying
an additional development engine would allow NASA to begin its testing program
sooner and conduct roughly 60 more tests than previously planned. Kynard said some 280 tests are now planned between 2010 and
late 2012, when NASA expects to conduct the first test flight of a full-up Ares
1 rocket and an
unmanned Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle.
If all goes
smoothly, Orion's first crewed flight could occur as early as September 2013.
However, NASA officials readily concede that March 2015 is the more realistic
date given the snags that tend to crop up in big development programs like
Orion and Ares.
With the
announcement of the J-2X contract, NASA moved a step closer to its goal of
having the entire Ares 1 rocket under contract by the end of 2007. The Orion prime
contract was awarded last August to Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
"We needed
to press forward so that we could still harvest some of the experience from
Apollo," said Jeff Hanley, NASA's Constellation program manager for the agency's
new manned spacecraft, adding that J-2X engineers sought input from Apollo
program veterans well-versed in the new engine's J-2 predecessor. "That's really
been a treat, I think, for the team ... to be able to go back and interact with
that generation."
Steve Cook,
manager of the Exploration Launch Projects Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight
Center, Huntsville, Ala., said the agency expects to finalize a contract with Alliant TechSystems by mid August for the
development of Ares 1's solid-rocket-booster-based main stage. Similar to Pratt
& Whitney Rocketdyne, Alliant
TechSystems got started on its Ares 1 work last year
under a temporary $120 million contract signed in late 2005.
By late
August, Cook said, NASA should be ready to announce which team it has selected to
build the Ares 1 upper stage. That
competition is pitting Boeing against an Alliant Techsytems-led team that includes Orion prime contractor
Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.
The contract is expected to be worth roughly $900 million.
A separate
contract for the rocket's avionics system, or instrument unit, is slated for
award around early December, he said. Five teams are finalizing bids for the
contract, which is expected to be worth roughly $400 million. The competing
teams are led by BAE Systems, Ball Aerospace and Technologies, Boeing, Honeywell,
and Raytheon.
SPACE.com staff writer
Tariq Malik contributed to
this story from New York.
