NASA’s massive new rocket on Thursday began its first journey to a launchpad ahead of a battery of tests that would clear it to blast off to the moon this summer.
It left the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at about 5:47pm and began an 11-hour journey on a crawler-transporter to the hallowed Launch Complex 39B, 6.5km away.
About 10,000 people had gathered to watch the event.
Photo: Reuters
With the Orion crew capsule fixed on top, the Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1 stands 98m high — taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York, but a little smaller than the 110m Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo missions to the moon.
Despite this, it would produce 39.1 meganewtons of thrust, 15 percent more than the Saturn V, meaning that it is expected to be the world’s most powerful rocket at the time it begins operating.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s most powerful rocket ever right here,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told the crowd. “We imagine, we build, we never stop pushing the envelope of what is possible.”
A symbol of US space ambition, it also comes with a hefty price tag of US$4.1 billion per launch for the first four Artemis missions, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin told the US Congress earlier this month.
After reaching the launchpad, two more weeks of checks are scheduled before what is known as the “wet dress rehearsal.”
The SLS team is to load more than 3.2 million liters of cryogenic propellant into the rocket and practice every phase of launch countdown, stopping 10 seconds before blast off.
NASA is targeting May as the earliest window for Artemis-1, an uncrewed lunar mission that would be the first integrated flight for the SLS and Orion.
The SLS would first place Orion into a low Earth orbit, and then, using its upper stage, perform what is called a translunar injection. This maneuver is necessary to send Orion 450,000km beyond Earth and 65,000km beyond the moon — further than any spaceship capable of carrying humans has ventured.
On its three-week mission, Orion would deploy 10 shoebox-sized satellites to gather information on the deep space environment. Its “passengers” would include three mannequins collecting radiation data and a NASA mascot.
Artemis-2 would be the first crewed test, flying around the moon without landing, while Artemis-3, planned for 2025, would see the first woman and first person of color touch down on the lunar south pole.
NASA wants to build a permanent presence on the moon and use it as a proving ground for technologies necessary for a Mars mission, sometime in the 2030s, using a Block 2 evolution of the SLS.
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