Crews at NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, worked April 19-20 to remove the first flight core stage of the agency's Space Launch System rocket from the B-2 Test Stand in preparation for its transport to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Operations required crews to lift the core stage from its vertical placement in the stand and lower it to a horizontal position on the B-2 Test Stand tarmac.
The stage now will be loaded on NASA's Pegasus barge for transport to Kennedy, where it will be prepared for launch of the Artemis I mission. Removal of the largest rocket stage ever built by NASA followed completion of a series of eight Green Run tests over the past year.
During the Green Run series, teams performed a comprehensive test of the stand's sophisticated and integrated systems. The series culminated in a hot fire of the stage's four RS-25 engines on the B-2 stand March 18. During the hot fire, the four engines generated a combined 1.6 million pounds of thrust, just as during an actual launch.
The test was the most powerful performed at Stennis in more than 40 years. NASA is building SLS, the world's most powerful rocket, to return humans to deep space missions. As part of the backbone of NASA's Artemis program, SLS will return humans, including the first woman and person of color, to the surface of the Moon to establish a sustainable presence and prepare for eventual missions to Mars.
Related Links
Space Launch System
Rocket Science News at Space-Travel.Com
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Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-68A engine completes final acceptance test for Delta 4 Heavy
Stennis Space Center MS (SPX) Apr 15, 2021
The world's most powerful hydrogen-fueled rocket engine built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, the RS-68A, has completed its final hot-fire acceptance test for use on the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle on the B-1 Test Stand at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. ULA's Delta IV Heavy rocket uses three Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-68A engines; one on each of its three common booster cores to launch the nation's most critical spacecraft into orbit. The three RS-68A engines combine ... read more