The agency gets ready for the debut of its most powerful rocket ever, dubbed the mega moon rocket, and officials are both excited and nervous.
The SLS is part of the Artemis program and is officially known as the Space Launch System. It just arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for prelaunch testing of the Artemis 1 mission.
NASA's upcoming spaceship makes us very excited, because we are always over the moon about any new launch vehicle. There are a few reasons why.
NASA rolls Artemis 1 moon mission for the first time.
The Apollo program delivered astronauts, experiments and moon buggies to our natural satellite in the 1960s and 1970s. During the Apollo missions, the Saturn V rocket carried people to the moon, so it's probably the measure against which all other launch vehicles should be compared.
The SLS will be in Block 1 of the Artemis program, which NASA hopes will eventually bring the first woman and person of color to the moon. The mega moon rocket will be capped by the crew vehicle and will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and weigh more than 2 million pounds.
It will be slightly shorter than the Saturn V, which was 362 ft (110.5 m) tall. The space shuttle system has a thrust of 7.8 million pounds, but SLS will be able to deliver 8.8 million pounds. More than 30 tons of SLS will be able to reach the moon. The mega moon rocket will have less carrying capacity than the Saturn V did, but it will be better because it will have different rocket stages and fuel.
SLS will be even better in the future. The Block 2 configuration, which will have an additional upper stage to deliver more thrust and a larger area for payloads, will be able to launch more than 50 tons into the sky, according to NASA. The rocket will be able to deliver crews and material to Mars, and should allow exploration of almost anywhere in the solar system.
The core stage of the SLS is home to four of the workhorses of the Artemis program. NASA has 16 of them on hand to use for different SLS missions, and they were originally used to launch the space shuttle. These veteran pieces of space hardware have been updated with new computer controllers and upgraded to handle the higher performance demands of a mega moon rocket launch.
According to Space.com, the rockets are powered by 730,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The core booster will be supplemented by two solid rocket boosters. Each of these is about the height of a 17-story building and can deliver 3.6 million pounds of thrust, according to NASA. The largest and most powerful solid boosters ever built will burn approximately 6 US tons of polybutadiene acrylonitrile propellant every second.
According to NASA, the SLS engines will provide an equivalent horsepower to 160,000 Corvette engines. This will be increased to 9.2 million pounds of thrust, 20% more than the Saturn V and the equivalent of 208,000 Chevrolet engines. The agency said that a single engine could generate enough power to illuminate a length of street that would reach the moon and back and then circle Earth 15 times.
NASA explained the Artemis 1 moon mission in photos.
One of NASA's stated goals is to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon.
According to Space.com, Artemis 3 is expected to bring people to the moon in the not too distant future. The program hopes to establish a base camp near the south pole of the moon called the Artemis Base Camp. The surface of the moon will allow for faster and more complicated procedures to be explored.
NASA's top science goals for Artemis are being focused on understanding planetary processes on airless worlds and whether they can be used as resources for human missions, learning more about the history of the Earth-moon system and searching for records.
The mega moon rocket will set the stage for further exploration of Mars, both by making it easier to undertake something like a robotic sample-return mission and by teaching NASA how to mitigate the risks involved in sending humans deeper into the solar system. Scientists can dream of even more ambitious projects, such as collecting samples from the geysers of the moon Enceladus, because it is extremely powerful and can carry large amounts of cargo.
Originally published on Live Science.
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