Promontory » Forty years to the day after astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on the moon, Alliant Techsystems on Monday unveiled its first completed solid-fuel booster motor designed for the Ares 1 rocket, NASA's next-generation of human space flight vehicle.

The five-segment booster motor will serve as the first stage for the Ares 1 rocket that NASA plans to begin using in 2015 to carry a crew capsule and small cargo payloads to the International Space Station, and eventually return man to the moon.

"As we reflect back 40 years to when man first stepped on the moon, we also look forward to continuing America's heritage of space exploration," Mike Kahn, executive vice president for ATK Space Systems, said as the building housing the motor was slowly rolled away behind him to reveal the booster engine. "The booster we're unveiling today brings us a step closer to continuing that legacy."

Although strikingly similar to the four-segment booster motors that for years have been used to propel the space shuttle into orbit, the new booster was built with an additional segment to provide more thrust and allow more weight to be lifted into orbit.

ATK will test fire the motor in late August at its plant near Brigham City.

Charlie Precourt, vice president and general manager of Space Launch Systems for ATK's Space Systems Group, is a former astronaut. At the event, he said the Ares 1 booster leverages the knowledge the company gained from its use of the solid-fuel booster motors on the space shuttle.

He said one of the important things ATK and NASA have learned is that stacking various stages of the Ares 1 rocket on top of one another will be far less risky than placing them side by side, which is done with the space shuttle. In that configuration, solid-fuel rocket booster motors sit on each side of the main external fuel tank.

"The Ares 1 will be twice as safe as any other launch vehicle," he said. "By stacking the stages we will be greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage," which is what happened on the fatal Columbia mission.

During the launch of Columbia in 2003, a piece of foam insulation broke off the main external fuel tank and damaged the shuttle's thermal tiles, which were designed to protect it from the heat generated by the Earth' atmosphere during re-entry.

Alex Priskos, the first-stage manager for NASA's Ares projects, said the booster motor test firing in Utah next month will be followed up by a flight test in October from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

During that test a four-segment ATK booster with a simulated fifth segment will be topped with mock-ups of the upper-stage liquid-fueled rocket motor and the Orion crew capsule.

"It will be the first of six test flights that we're planning for the Ares 1," he said.

steve@sltrib.com