Just a few days after the 45th anniversary of the first moon landing, NASA is making good progress building the largest rocket ever and the engine for the rocket is set for testing in the coming weeks.
Called the Space Launch System (SLS), the rocket stands 321 feet tall and was designed to take a six-man crew into space farther than anyone has ever gone. It is being built in the Michoud Assembly Facility, the same facility that produced the Saturn rocket used in the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle's giant fuel tanks. As proof of the SLS's heft, some of the barrels that will make up the core of the rocket and carry fuel for its launch are being welded piece by piece together by more than 600 people at the NASA facility.
The SLS will look familiar because it will be using the Orion capsule at the top. This is because the rules of physics governing the launch and return of the rocket are very much the same as it was in the days of Apollo. Inside, however, it will be completely different.
The SLS is due for testing in December, with future missions possibly including a trip to mars or an asteroid close to the moon. A rocket isn't much use without an engine though so NASA recently installed an RS-25 engine at the Stennis Space Center on an A-1 Test Stand. The core stage of the SLS will use four RS-25s.
The RS-25 rocket engine is a version of the main engine that space shuttles used for space missions between 1981 and 2011.
"This test series is a major milestone because it will be our first opportunity to operate the engine with a new controller and to test propellant inlet conditions for SLS that are different than the space shuttle," said SLS Liquid Engines Element manager Steve Wofford. It will determine and confirm if the RS-25 will be successful at providing the kind of power the SLS will need to launch into space.
Flight certification and developmental tests on the RS-25 engine will begin in the next few weeks. The A-1 Test Stand that will be used is the original test stand built for testing engines that helped make missions to the moon in the 1960s a reality. It was also used for other high-profile testing projects over the years, but NASA has modified the A-1 Test Stand to be suitable for the RS-25 engine, a project that took close to a year to accomplish.
