- NASA destroyed its expensive Space Launch System rocket during testing, but it was fully planned.
- The space agency has to push the hardware beyond its limits to know how much it can handle, and it gathers a large amount of data from each of these tests.
- NASA expects the SLS to take astronauts to the moon by 2024.
NASA is heading back to the Moon. He plans to send astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024, though that date has always seemed overly optimistic to most experts, and when he does, he will use the SLS or Space Launch System rocket to make this happen. The SLS has been in development for a long time and has undergone rigorous testing to ensure it meets NASA’s demands.
Now NASA has released a video showing its own destruction of the SLS rocket. By intentionally pushing the rocket beyond its designed force limits, the space agency has a better idea of how durable it really is. A video of these tests has been shared, but this is the first time we’ve seen the racks of how everything unfolded.
As you can see in the video, NASA has destroyed the SLS in several ways, including pressure tests that caused the rocket’s body to open like a soda can. It’s really amazing to see, especially when you consider how much it costs to even build these rockets built to be destroyed (hundreds of millions of dollars, to be conservative).
NASA offers the following context for the images we see:
NASA has completed the structural test campaign for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. A test version of the rocket’s liquid oxygen tank was pushed to its limits on June 22.
Engineers at Marshall’s test lab worked with the SLS team to test four of the structures that make up most of the rocket’s 212-foot center stage and also the structures that make up the entire top of the rocket. The final test concludes a nearly three-year series of structural tests that qualified the structural design of these multiple hardware elements for the rocket that will launch NASA’s Artemis and astronaut missions to the Moon.
With the large amount of data that NASA collects during these tests, the space agency can be confident that the spacecraft will withstand the forces that will be applied during a normal mission. It also provides some reassurance that the rocket can withstand additional stresses in case something goes wrong, but like every piece of hardware NASA has sent into space, it has a breaking point.
NASA eventually hopes to send humans to the Moon using one of these rockets. The short timeline has been criticized by many, but the speed at which things come together suggests that it may be possible to make the launch window of 2024. However, things could always change in the future.
Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering the latest news and trends in virtual reality, handheld devices, smartphones, and future technology. Most recently, Mike served as technical editor at The Daily Dot, and has appeared on USA Today, Time.com, and countless other websites and in print. His love of reporting is second only to his addiction to games.
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