A NASA deep-space spacecraft rocket built by Boeing soon detonated the four engines of its main behemoth stage for the first time Saturday, cutting an important test to push the U.S. government’s one-year delay program to humans return to the moon in the next few years. .
Set up in a test facility at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, the 212-foot-high heart rate of the Space Launch System (SLS) remained at 4:27 local time (2227 GMT) for a little more on the minute – very short on which engineers had to wait about eight minutes to stay on track to launch the first rocket in November this year.
“Today was a great day,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a post-test press conference, adding that “we’ve got a lot of data that we’re going to be able to sort through.” to determine if a renewal is required and whether it is still possible to launch the November 2021 start date.
The engine test, the final leg of NASA’s nearly-year “Green Run” test mission, was a crucial step for the space agency and major contractor SLS Boeing before it was later launched without staff. this year under NASA ‘s Artemis program, the Trump administration’ s effort to return U.S. astronauts to the moon by 2024.
It was unclear whether Boeing and NASA would have to do the test again, a preview that the first release could push into 2022. NASA SLS program manager John Honeycutt, warns of the next release -analysis of data from the ongoing test, informing reporters that the turnaround time for another hot fire test could be around a month.
To simulate the interior conditions of a real building, the four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines were lit for about one minute and 15 seconds, generating 1.6 million pounds of effort and consuming 700,000 gallons of stimulators on the ground. NASA’s largest test center, a large facility building 35 stories high.
The heavy-duty super-lift SLS is last three years on schedule and nearly $ 3 billion above budget. Critics have long argued that NASA will release key rocket-age technologies, which have launch costs of $ 1 billion or more per mission, in favor of newer commercial options which promises lower costs.
In comparison, it costs as little as $ 90 million to fly the huge but less powerful Falcon Heavy rocket designed and manufactured by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and about $ 350 million each launch for Delta IV Heavy, the legacy of United Launch Alliance.
While newer, more reusable rockets from the two companies – SpaceX’s Starship and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan – promise heavier lifting capacity than the Falcon Heavy or Delta IV Heavy which could be at a lower cost, supporters of SLS argue that it would take two or more launches of these rockets to launch what the SLS could carry in a single mission.
Reuters reported in October that President Joe Biden’s space advisers are aiming to delay Trump’s 2024 target, throwing new doubts about the long-term future of SLS just as SpaceX will and Jeff Originz ‘Blue Origin’ scrambling to bring new heavy construction capacity to market.
NASA and Boeing engineers have stayed on a 10-month record for the Green Run “despite much opposition this year,” Boeing SLS manager John Shannon told reporters this week , announcing five tropical and hurricane storms that hit Stennis, as well as shutting it down three months after some engineers tested positive for the coronavirus in March.