Four years after NASA embraced Ares I as the next route to space for U.S. astronauts, the new crew launch vehicle is beginning to move from computer-aided-design workstations to the floors of various "fab labs" here that in some cases date back to the Saturn V program in the 1960s.

However, the Ares I's destiny is very much up in the air as a panel headed by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine pores over options for U.S. human spaceflight. The panel is pitting progress, and problems, here against human-rating the Delta IV heavy that already is flying cargo, and against a few other concepts that are still in the "paper-rocket" stage (see pp. 12, 45 and 46).

Augustine's group is scheduled to report by the end of August, just about the time ATK conducts the first full-scale static test of the solid-fuel Ares I first stage - a single five-segment modification of the twin four-segment boosters that help lift the space shuttle off the pad. The White House plans to use the Augustine report to decide whether to continue developing the Ares I and the lunar-exploration architecture it supports, move to another rocket, or perhaps even give the space shuttle fleet a new lease on life beyond its planned retirement at the end of next year.

The decision, which may include changes in the Fiscal 2010 NASA budget request already being considered on Capitol Hill, will have more moving parts than a cryogenic rocket engine. President Barack Obama and his science advisers must weigh not only the technical merits of the various human-spaceflight vehicles on the table, but also the budgetary, domestic political and international-relations implications of their choices.

Just as the shuttle has been flying for almost 30 years, the outcome of the space-policy rethinking now underway will shape human space transportation for decades to come. And at this Alabama field center, NASA engineers on the Ares I project are using an approach that dates back to the 1930s, when Wern­her von Braun and his colleagues at the German army's Kummersdorf ordnance center near Berlin started developing rockets in-house before farming out production to industry.

The idea is to hold down Ares I costs by maintaining control over its development as long as possible. The hope is to minimize the gap between the last shuttle flight and the first flight of the Orion crew exploration vehicle on an Ares I. A lot of infrastructure von Braun's team built here for the Saturn V is being recycled in the process, some of it unique facilities that would not be affordable in today's economic squeeze.

"This is the von Braun arsenal model, where you build hardware where the engineers reside," says Steve Cook, NASA Ares projects manager for the Constellation Program that is developing all of the NASA vehicles for a return to the Moon by 2020. "Now that doesn't mean you go into full-scale production, because that's not what we're intending to do. But you have the manufacturing engineers, the technicians and the designers all working together to work through the issues, and then you take it down to your production facility."

As with the first stage, the Ares I upper stage is based on human-rated shuttle hardware. The newest version of the shuttle external tank is made of friction stir-welded aluminum lithium to save weight en route to the high-inclination International Space Station orbit. The Ares I stage will advance that technology based on work underway in a new fabrication laboratory housed in an old warehouse originally used to prepare Saturn components for shipment.

NASA and Boeing engineers are working side-by-side on the techniques they will use to friction stir-weld the upper stage tank domes, including a tricky common bulkhead. Essentially, that bulkhead is two tank domes stuck together with a layer of insulating honeycomb in the middle for thermal separation of the stage's liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. The dome sections will be fitted together using white-light scanning to produce a digital map of their precise shapes that will guide the numerically controlled machines that produce the honeycomb core.

Experts in friction stir-welding - using a rotating spindle to soften the two halves of a join for bonding - already have produced their first tank dome using the same robotic tool that Boeing will use in upper stage production at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. They are also beginning to assemble tank walls on a different tool to the same end, using some of the same operators and manufacturing engineers who will do the jobs at Michoud.