NASA PRESS RELEASE
CLEVELAND — NASA has awarded a nearly $7 million contract to Aerojet-General Corporation of Sacramento, Calif., to design, develop, fabricate, test and evaluate a new rocket engine as part of the space agency’s efforts to land humans on the moon.
The objective of this work is to sufficiently increase the maturity of this technology to establish the feasibility of using a liquid oxygen and liquid methane main engine for the ascent stage of the Altair lunar lander. After visiting the lunar outpost, the crew will lift off from the surface of the moon in Altair’s ascent stage and rendezvous with the Orion crew vehicle in lunar orbit for the return trip to Earth.
Aerojet will work for 21 months to complete an evaluation of the rocket engine assembly, a 5,500 pound constant-thrust, pressure-fed rocket engine. The contract’s period of performance began on April 8.
This cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is valued at approximately $6.9 million. The Exploration Technology Development Program at NASA’s Headquarters in Washington is providing the funding.
AEROJET AND ORBITAL SCIENCES PRESS RELEASE
April 7, 2008
Aerojet and Orbital Sciences Corporation announced today that together the two companies successfully conducted a static firing of the jettison motor, a key component of the Launch Abort System (LAS) for NASA’s Orion next generation human spaceflight program.
Orion’s LAS, being developed by Orbital, is a new capability that will allow the astronaut crew to safely escape in the event of an emergency during pad operations or during the ascent phase of the flight.
Aerojet is responsible for the jettison motor, which would be used on every mission to jettison the LAS when it is no longer needed. The successful test firing of the jettison motor increases the technical readiness of the LAS and is a major operational accomplishment as the first full-scale rocket propulsion test for the Orion program.
Continue reading ‘Aerojet and Orbital Successful Fire Orion Jettison Motor’
AEROJET PRESS RELEASE
SACRAMENTO, Calif., March 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Aerojet, a GenCorp NYSE: GY company, announced today that Jules Verne — the first of the European Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV) — has successfully launched aboard the European expendable launch system, Ariane 5, out of Kourou in French Guiana.
For the mission, Aerojet delivered four R-4D main engines that will be used to accomplish the early circularization maneuvers and docking simulations. NASA announced that the ATV reached its preliminary orbit about nine minutes after liftoff. When preliminary orbit was achieved, the ATV engines fired for eight minutes to place the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit. About 45 minutes later, a second engine firing circularized the ATV’s orbit prior to spacecraft separation.
Once in orbit, the ATV will undergo four weeks of extensive systems tests, including two approaches to the station to simulate rendezvous and contingency techniques.
Continue reading ‘Aerojet Celebrates Launch of Jules Verne’
Aerojet and Boeing have signed an associate contractor’s agreement to build the upper stage of the Ares rocket for NASA’s Orion lunar program. The contract also involves four other companies: Hamilton Sundstrand, Jacobs Engineering Group, Moog Inc., and Teledyne Brown Engineering. Aerojet, a division of GenCorp, is based in Rancho Cordova, Calif.
Read the Sacramento Bee story here. Aerojet has also issued a press release.
