NASA boosters arrive at Kennedy Space Center
Piece by piece, NASA’s Space Launch System is making its way to Florida.
The latest addition are pieces of the two solid rocket boosters that will one day be mated to a core stage to take the Orion crew capsule on NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon.
Ten segments of the two boosters made their way by train crosscountry from the Northrop Grumman testing facility in Promontory, Utah.
“The arrival of the booster segments at Kennedy is just the beginning of the SLS rocket’s journey to the pad and onward to send the Orion spacecraft to the Moon,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine in a news release. “Artemis I will pave the way toward landing the first woman and the next man on the surface of the Moon in 2024 and expanding human exploration to Mars.”
While the massive core stage remains at NASA’s Stennis Space Center for a full hot-fire test before making its way to Kennedy later this year, the booster segments join other hardware already at KSC.
Some work will happen now at KSC’s Rotation, Processing and
Surge Facility, but eventually the boosters will make their way to the Vehicle Assembly Building to be stacked and mated with the core stage on the mobile launcher ahead of an eventual rollout to Launch Pad 39-B.
Artemis I, which NASA aims to launch in 2021, will be an uncrewed mission to the moon. Artemis II will be crewed but not land on the moon. Artemis III will return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972, and plans are for that to include the first woman on the moon.
NASA’s goal is to accomplish that by 2024.
The two solid rocket boosters will actually produce a majority of the Space Launch System’s potential 8.8 million pounds of thrust in its biggest version. The core stage with its four RS-25 engines, refurbished from the space shuttle program, contribute 2 million pounds of thrust.
NASA touts SLS as the only rocket that can bring the Orion capsule, astronauts and cargo to the moon in one launch.
The segments, each weighing 180 tons, were transferred after the 2,800-mile trip from train to NASA’s Shuttle Wagon at a train yard in Titusville for its trip into the space center. This is the same transport that carted space shuttle boosters on site.
“It’s an exciting time at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as we welcome Artemis flight hardware and continue working toward the Artemis I launch,” said Kennedy Space Center Director Bob Cabana.
Northrop Grumman also sent from Utah a pair of test motor segments for its own heavy-lift rocket in the works: OmegA, which hopes to also use Launch Pad 39-B starting in 2021.
The company will use those segments as test articles in a newly-modified Mobile Launch Platform 3 (MLP-3) in the VAB ahead of the arrival of the real flight motors this fall.
For SLS, though, the solid rocket boosters married with the core stage will become the largest rocket to ever launch from Earth, surpassing the Saturn V rockets of the Apollo missions.