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Ares Rocket Named TIME Magazine's 2009 Best Invention of the Year

Fri, 11/13/2009 - 9:41am — andrewm

WASHINGTON, DC, Thursday, November 12, 2009

NASA’s Ares rocket today topped the list of TIME Magazine’s “50 Best Inventions of 2009.” The acclaim comes on the heels of a flawless Ares I-X test flight on October 28th, 2009, from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Ares I-X test flight marks the latest successful step in NASA’s plan to take space exploration by humans beyond low Earth orbit. The Ares rocket is under development at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) released the following statement upon learning that TIME honored the Ares rocket as the “Best Invention of the Year”:

“This is hard-earned and well-deserved recognition for NASA and its legion of talented scientists and engineers that are developing the Ares rocket. This honor underscores the great progress and critical importance of the Ares rocket to the Constellation program."

Metal has no DNA; machines have no genes. But that doesn't mean they don't have pedigrees — ancestral lines every bit as elaborate as our own. That's surely the case with the Ares 1 rocket. The best and smartest and coolest thing built in 2009 — a machine that can launch human beings to cosmic destinations we'd never considered before — is the fruit of a very old family tree, one with branches grand, historic and even wicked.

There are a lot of reasons astronauts haven't moved beyond the harbor lights of low-Earth orbit in nearly 40 years, but one of them is that we haven't had the machines to take us anywhere else. The space shuttle is a flying truck: fine for the lunch-bucket work of hauling cargo a couple of hundred miles into space, but nothing more. In 2004, however, the U.S. committed itself to sending astronauts back to the moon and later to Mars, and for that, you need something new and nifty for them to fly. The answer is the Ares 1, which had its first unmanned flight on Oct. 28 and dazzled even the skeptics.

Read the full article at Time.com ...