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The test is a vital step in NASA’s Artemis program to put the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024.
NASA fired up all four engines of a deep space exploration rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), for the first time on Saturday, but the “hot fire” test ended much earlier than expected.
Mounted in a test facility at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, the SLS’s 212-foot (65-meter) high center stage came to life at 4:27 p.m. local time (22:27 GMT) for little longer. one minute, quite short. of the roughly four minutes it took the engineers to stay on track for the mega-rocket’s first launch in November this year.
During the live broadcast of the test, NASA did not explain the reason for the early shutdown, but Wayne Hale, a former manager of NASA’s space shuttle program, suggested a “major component failure.”
Well, MCF wasn’t a call this climb flight director ever wanted to hear – the SSME controller detects the major component failure.
– Wayne Hale (@waynehale) January 16, 2021
Totally agree. Very valuable. Discussions will now begin on whether enough data was collected or whether the test needs to be rerun; Either way, the engine will likely be replaced. Of course the experts will probably tell us in the post-test conference shortly https://t.co/523kXgoVl5
– Wayne Hale (@waynehale) January 16, 2021
The fiery spectacle, the last leg of NASA’s “Green Run” test campaign, which lasted nearly a year, was a vital step for the space agency and its main SLS contractor, Boeing, ahead of the rocket’s launch in November.
The success of that unmanned mission, called “Artemis 1,” will set the stage for the first human landing on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. US President Donald Trump has pushed for that trip, which You will also see the first woman on the Moon – which will happen in 2024.
It was unclear whether Boeing and NASA would have to repeat Saturday’s test, a prospect that could push the debut launch until 2022.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, speaking at a press conference after the test, said the agency “obtained a lot of data that we can classify” to determine if a replay is necessary.
NASA’s SLS program manager John Honeycutt cautioned that review of the test data is continuing and told reporters that the turnaround time for another hot fire test could be about a month.
The expendable super heavy duty SLS is three years late and nearly $ 3 billion over budget.
Critics have long argued that NASA is withdrawing core rocket technologies from the shuttle era, which have launch costs of a billion dollars or more per mission, in favor of newer commercial alternatives that promise lower costs.
By comparison, it costs just $ 90 million to fly the massive but less powerful Falcon Heavy rocket designed and manufactured by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and about $ 350 million per launch for the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy legacy.
While the newer and reusable rockets from both companies, SpaceX’s Starship and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, promise heavier lift capacity than the Falcon Heavy or Delta IV Heavy, potentially at a lower cost, SLS backers have argued. that it would take two or more launches on those rockets to launch what the SLS could carry on a single mission.
Reuters reported in October that President-elect Joe Biden’s space advisers were aiming to delay Trump’s goal to 2024, casting new doubts about the long-term fate of SLS just as SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are scrambling to bring the market a new rival heavy lifting capacity. .
NASA and Boeing engineers have stayed on a 10-month schedule for the Green Run “despite having a lot of adversity this year,” Boeing SLS manager John Shannon told reporters this week, citing five tropical storms and a hurricane that hit Stennis, as well as a three-month shutdown after some engineers tested positive for the coronavirus in March.
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