NASA’s mega-sized lunar rocket encountered an engine problem during a critical test on Saturday, and the error could further delay the agency’s effort to send astronauts to the moon.
The rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), is designed to finish off 111-foot feet and transport astronauts to the moon sometime in the middle to late 2020.
The system is an essential part of a larger program called Artemis, a roughly $ 30 billion effort to put the boots back on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. NASA has spent about $ 18 billion Americans developing the rocket.
The SLS main stage, the largest piece of the system and its structural backbone, was assembled and tightly linked to the Stennis Bay Bay space center. Louis, Mississippi, Saturday for a critical “hot fire” test.
For the first time, the rocket was ready to simultaneously fire its four powerful RS-25 engines as it would for launch.
The main stage is the largest and most powerful rocket stage in the world, according to NASA. It houses five main sections, including a 537,000-gallon (2 million-liter) tank for liquid hydrogen, a 196,000-gallon (742,000-liter) tank for liquid oxygen, four RS-25 engines, avionics computers, and other subsystems.
Boeing is the main contractor for the stage and Aerojet Rocketdyne is responsible for its RS-25 engines, which used to help propel NASA’s space shuttle fleet.
Fuel tanks were filled Saturday with 733,000 gallons of cryogenically refrigerated propellant and the engines came to life at 5:27 p.m. EST.
“It was like an earthquake,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters at a news conference after the test.
“It was a magnificent moment. And it only made me happy that after all this time, we now have a rocket. The only rocket on the planet’s surface capable of bringing humans to the moon fired all four RS-25 engines at the same time. time. “
The engines were supposed to fire continuously for eight minutes. But after a minute of testing, the engine controller sent an order to the center stage controller to shut them down.
Stennis Space Center teams take the main stage on January 22 (NASA)
Drivers had seen a flash next to the thermal protection blanket covering engine four. Shortly afterwards, that engine recorded an MCF, or “major component failure.” It is still unclear what happened.
“At the time they made the call, we still had four good engines running at 109%,” John Honeycutt, the SLS program manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, told a news conference.
Everything was captured on NASA’s live broadcast:
“The amount of progress we’ve made here today is remarkable. And no, that’s not a failure. This is a test. And we’ve tested in a meaningful way today, where we’re going to learn and ‘let’s make adjustments and fly to the moon, “Bridenstine said.
The SLS team will spend the next few days examining the test data, evaluating the center stage and engines to find out what happened and how to move forward.
It is possible that NASA will have to do the hot fire test again
Saturday’s hot fire was to be the eighth and final step of NASA’s “Green Run,” a program designed to thoroughly test every part of the center stage before the first SLS launch, called Artemis 1, a flight unmanned test run currently scheduled for November 2021.
But that timeline may be unrealistic now. If the hot fire went well, NASA planned to send the rocket to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in February. There, workers would stack all the segments of the two impellers needed to send Artemis 1 around the moon.
It is unclear how long it will take NASA to correct the engine error and now reach the center stage in Florida.
“It depends on what anomaly it was and how difficult it will be to fix it. And we have to learn a lot to find out,” Bridenstine said.
“It could very well be that it’s something that can be easily solved and that we can be confident in going down to the Cape and staying on time. It’s also true that we could find a challenge that will take longer.”
The agency may need to redo the hot fire test. The SLS team wanted to reach a minimum of 250 seconds of engines firing together to have great confidence in the vehicle. Saturday’s test lasted just over 60 seconds.
It would take at least four or five days to prepare the Stennis Space Center facilities for another test. If NASA needs to replace current engines with new ones, workers can do so on site at the Stennis Space Center. Honeycutt estimated that it would take about seven to ten days to do so.
“That’s why we try,” Bridenstine said. “Before we put American astronauts on American rockets, that’s when we need it to be perfect.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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