The agency’s long-awaited, costly Space Launch System is finally ready for a practice countdown before the first Artemis mission this spring.
—a test run and staging ground for eventually sending astronauts to Mars—there’s a lot riding on that rocket.
“This is a very exciting time. It’s going to be a wonderful sight when we see that amazing Artemis vehicle cross the threshold of the VAB and we see it outside of that building for the very first time. I think it will be breathtaking and something really special,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director at Kennedy Space Center, at a press conference on Monday.
Once SLS arrives, engineers will have about two weeks to complete their final tests. Those will include: checking interfaces between the core stage, boosters, and ground systems; a booster thrust control test; and testing radio frequency antennas that allow communication between mission control, the rocket, and Orion.
“You’re basically trying to mitigate Murphy’s law,” says Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer and space sustainability researcher at the University of Texas at Austin. “The thing about operations is that there’s always something that comes up that’s not necessarily nominal. But if you do a good job with your dress rehearsals, then you can identify where problems could arise and plans for how to take care of them in short order.
NASA plans at least five lunar missions as part of the Artemis program, including launching a crew and a moon-orbiting station. But over time the agency has pushed back from a start originally planned for 2019, while SLS was originally expected to be ready before that. The budget for the program has also ballooned. At a March 1, NASA inspector general Paul Martin estimated that costs per mission would be much higher than the original estimates, which were around $2 billion.
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