Design
The Ares V was intended as a heavy-launch vehicle to send large hardware and materials to the Moon, or to send supplies beyond Earth orbit to sustain human presence there. The Ares V was designed to be a three-stage rocket: the first and second stages, which burn together, were to utilize both solid and liquid propulsion with the upper stage providing the necessary propulsion to send the hardware and staples beyond low-Earth orbit and onto a trajectory to the Moon.
Ares V underwent a preliminary design review after the results of the 2009 Augustine Commission. Like the Space Shuttle, the Ares vehicle was to utilize a pair of solid-fuel first stage rocket boosters that burn simultaneously with the liquid-fueled second (core) stage. The solid rocket booster on Ares V was first envisioned as an improved version of the current Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster, but with five or five and a half segments instead of the current four segments. The liquid-fueled second stage was to be derived from the Space Shuttle External Tank and was to use either five or six RS-68B engines attached to the bottom of a new 10 m tank, or five SSMEs attached to the bottom of a stretched version of the Space Shuttle's 8.4 m tank. It was to be fueled by liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen (LH2).
The upper stage, derived from the S-IVB upper stage used on the Saturn IB and Saturn V rockets, was named the Earth Departure Stage (EDS). The EDS would be powered by an Apollo-derived J-2X rocket engine, which was also to be used on the liquid-fueled upper stage of the Ares I booster. The EDS was to be used to steer the Altair lunar lander into its initial low-Earth "parking" orbit for later retrieval by the Orion spacecraft, and then would propel both the Altair and Orion to the Moon. The EDS could also have been used to haul large payloads into low-Earth orbit, along with placing large unmanned spacecraft onto trajectories beyond the Earth-Moon system.
The Ares V was designed to have a payload capacity of over 414,000 lb (188 metric tons) to Low Earth orbit (LEO), and 157,000 lb (71 metric tons) to the Moon. Upon completion the Ares V would be the most powerful rocket ever built, lifting more into orbit than even the American Saturn V, the failed Soviet N-1 for the canceled Soviet Moonshot, and the successful Soviet/Russian Energia booster developed for the Buran Shuttle. Besides its lunar role, it could also support a manned Orion expedition to a Near-Earth asteroid, and could boost an 8 to 16-meter successor of the Hubble Space Telescope to the Sun-Earth L2 point.
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