New NASA rocket passes initial design review

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA on Wednesday cleared the launch system being developed to replace the space shuttle for a detailed design review, confident the Ares rocket will meet technical, safety and budget requirements.

The decision followed a preliminary design review held at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

"It is an important milestone in the progress of the exploration effort," Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, told reporters on a teleconference call.

Prime contractors for the Ares launcher are Boeing Co's ATK Launch Systems and Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne. The U.S. space agency expects to spend $3 billion a year in 2009 and 2010 to keep the program on track for a debut launch in 2015.

Plans to begin using Ares to fly astronauts to the International Space Station in 2014 were scuttled when Congress decided not to appropriate the extra $1 billion a year needed to speed up development.

The new rockets are being designed to carry a capsule-style spacecraft called Orion, which can fly to the moon as well as to the space station in low-Earth orbit.

Ares is the first new human-rated rocket NASA has designed since the space shuttle debuted in 1981.

(Reporting by Irene Klotz, editing by Tom Brown)