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Jon
Cowart: Well, Ares I-X was conceived when they werelooking
at things we could do to show demonstrable stepsthat
we were accomplishing things within the Constellation program.At
one time there were no flight tests of anyrockets
to be done and when they looked at thatand
they said, "Well there’s an awful long gap betweenthe
time, you know, we’re ramping down shuttle and
the time we actually see something happening."And
it’s just not a good ideato go that long.It actually inspires people to see that sort
of thing.Plus it'll give you a lot of good data.That was one of the prime drivers as well,was just go get a bunch of good dataabout
a really radical design in a rocket.To
have something that thin and that tallhad
never been done before.So let's go get some data-
engineering data.Also, we'll get some good
visibility about how this thing is going to goand when you add all that upthey
decided, "Well, let's go try it."Steve
Davis: Doing flight tests are probably the best wayto
understand a system, and the best way totrain
engineers as- even future developers- designershow
to go do things. You cannot learn just from
a set of trade studiesand so on. You have to
get in there andactually, if you will,
get your hands dirty and so on. Stack something.Watch the difficulties as things come together.Shimming things. You don't think about this many times.How wires fit within a system. Going through an electrical checkout and so on.All of those things develop an engineering teamand enable you to do far greater things.So the first thing I would say isthe
flight test itself- even beyond the factthat
you'll learn so much about the vehicle,which
it's- was the reason why we really did it.Just
training the team and training the personnelwas
incredibly beneficial.As beneficial, in my mindas actually how well the vehicle flew.