NASA has been telling us how big the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will be when finally assembled on the launch pad. “It’s the biggest rocket the agency has built since the Apollo V moon rocket,” the space agency says frequently.
New pictures taken over the holidays give the clearest understanding of just how large that is. NASA recently completed assembling the SLS core stage including its four space shuttle main engines and the liquid hydrogen and oxygen tanks that will feed them.
It has just rolled the core from the assembly building at the Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans to another facility to be prepped for water travel. The 212-foot-long core that also includes the rocket’s avionics (electronics) will travel from Michoud via barge to NASA’s nearby Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for live engine testing later this year.
When fully assembled with the upper stage including the Orion capsule and European Service Module, SLS will be 322 feet tall - taller than the Statue of Liberty - but still shorter than Apollo by nearly 60 feet. It is more powerful, however, with 8.5 million pounds of thrust compared to the moon rocket’s 7.5 million pounds.
SLS isn’t the only big rocket under development in America today. SpaceX has a 348-foot tall rocket called Starship under development, and Blue Origin is working on its New Glenn rocket that will be somewhere between 269 and 311 feet tall. All of these rockets are being designed to lift heavy payloads into orbit or journeying to Mars.
SLS development is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., which also built the rocket’s avionics. Its main contractor is Boeing, which also has a large rocket workforce in the city. NASA expects to finish live engine testing this year and then ship the core to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for vertical mating to the Orion capsule and service module. SLS will likely launch without a crew in 2021 for its first trip around the Moon.
As all that is happening, NASA and Boeing will be assembling two more SLS rockets. The second will fly astronauts around the Moon on a test flight, and the third will take America’s first woman and next man to the Moon for a landing. President Trump has ordered NASA to make that landing by 2024.
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January 03, 2020 at 04:45AM
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How big is NASA’s Space Launch System? Check these new images - AL.com
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