Washington. NASA’s new giant rocket arrived at its launch pad on Friday, ready for a series of tests before it is cleared to take off for the moon this summer in an uncrewed flight.
The spacecraft left the Kennedy Space Center’s Aircraft Assembly Building Thursday night and began a nearly 11-hour journey on a crawler transporter to Launch Complex 39B, arriving at 04:15 local time.
About 10,000 people had gathered to watch the event.
astronomical cost
With the Orion capsule at its tip, the SLS rocket (Space Launch System, in Spanish) is 98 meters tall, more than the Statue of Liberty, but a little less than the 110 meters of the Saturn V rocket, which sent the man to the Moon during the Apollo missions.
However, the SLS will boast a thrust of 39.1 meganewtons, 15 percent more than the Saturn V, making it the most powerful rocket in the world.
After its arrival at the iconic launch pad, from which 53 space shuttles have already taken off, for about two weeks the SLS will undergo more checks before what is known as the “wet dress rehearsal”.
On April 3, the SLS will load more than 3.2 million liters of cryogenic propellant into the rocket and practice each countdown phase of the launch, pausing ten seconds before liftoff without firing the engines.
“From this sacred and historic place, humanity will soon embark on a new era of exploration,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Friday.
This “symbol” of America’s space ambition, as Tom Whitmeyer, a senior NASA official, called it this week, comes with a heavy bill.
Each launch for the first four Artemis missions to the Moon will cost 4.1 billion dollars (3.7 billion euros), the inspector general of the US space agency, Paul Martin, stressed before Congress this month.
To the Moon and beyond
NASA is targeting a May first launch window for Artemis 1, an unmanned lunar mission that will be the first to combine the SLS rocket and Orion capsule.
The SLS will first place Orion in low Earth orbit before, thanks to its upper stage, performing a “translunar injection”.
This maneuver is necessary to send Orion more than 450 thousand km from Earth and almost 64 thousand km beyond the Moon, farther than any other manned spacecraft.
During its three-week mission, Orion will deploy ten shoebox-sized satellites called CubeSats that will collect information about deep space.
The capsule will travel to the dark side of the Moon using its thrusters provided by the European Space Agency (ESA), and then return to Earth, specifically to the Pacific, off the coast of California.
We will have to wait for Artemis 2, scheduled for 2024, to see a manned test flight. Then the capsule will go around the Moon, without landing on it, while Artemis 3, scheduled for 2025 at the earliest, will take the first woman and the first black person to lunar soil, at the south pole of the satellite.
NASA wants to test some technologies on the Moon that it wants to use during its future missions to Mars in the 2030s.
SLS or Starship
With its launch SLS will enter the category of “super-heavy” launchers, for the moment only made up of Space X’s Falcon Heavy, which is smaller than the SLS.
Elon Musk’s company is developing another deep-space rocket: Starship, which is fully reusable and which the billionaire said would be ready for an orbital test this year.
Starship will be bigger and more powerful than the SLS: at 120 meters tall, it will have an output of 75 meganewtons and will be much cheaper.
According to Elon Musk, within a few years the cost per launch could be reduced to 10 million dollars (9 million euros).
But the two rockets are not comparable: The SLS is designed to go directly to its final destination, while SpaceX plans to launch a Starship rocket into orbit and then resupply it with another Starship rocket to extend its range and payload.
NASA has also contracted with SpaceX for a version of Starship that would be used as a lunar landing vehicle for Artemis.
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