France Press agencyPosted on Thursday March 18, 2021 at 10:43 pm.
On Thursday, NASA successfully tested the engines of its new giant SLS rocket, which will someday take astronauts to the moon, a relief to the US space agency after a previous test interruption in January.
The RS-25’s main four engines, each the size of a car, were fired for just over eight minutes, which is the goal, to simulate the launch stage.
They threw a huge plume of smoke, in a deafening noise, over the test center in Stennis, Mississippi.
For this so-called “hot fire” test, which was conducted around 8:40 PM GMT, the tanks were filled with approximately 2.6 million liters of fuel.
NASA tweeted on the official account of the missile, shortly after applause in the control room, “It passed the test.”
At the end of January, in a similar test, the engines stopped much earlier than expected, after just over a minute of ignition.
This time, “nothing was forced into an early stop, which is a very good thing,” said Thursday Bill and Rubell, in charge of these tests for NASA, during a live broadcast of the US Space Agency on the Internet. The data now needs to be analyzed in detail.
The SLS (Space Launch System) heavy missile is already years behind schedule. It is a powerful launcher intended to carry the Orion spacecraft, as part of the American Artemis return to the moon program.
This test was the last in a series of eight tests intended to verify that the main stage of the missile was ready for launch Artemis missions. This stage is approximately 65 meters high, and consists of engines, tanks, and computers that form the “brain” of the missile.
It will now be transferred to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first flight, Artemis 1, will be scheduled for later this year according to the initial schedule, with the Orion capsule at its top, with no astronaut on board.
Artemis 2, in 2023, will send astronauts around the moon, but they won’t land.
Finally, Artemis will send 3 astronauts to lunar soil, including the first woman, in theory in 2024.
In its Artemis 1 configuration, the SLS will be larger than the Statue of Liberty and more powerful than the iconic Saturn V that took American astronauts to the moon in the last century.
SpaceX is also developing a heavy launch platform, Starship, to reach the moon and even Mars. The last tests of this missile ended in impressive explosions. A new test flight of the Starship prototype could be made in the coming days.
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