It’s well known NASA’s Space Launch System is the most powerful in the world.
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Two solid rocket boosters, each 177 feet tall, will help NASA’s next generation of rocket escape the grasp of Earth’s gravity. The stream will be live at 10:30 a.m. Eastern.
The booster will be fired up at Orbital ATK Propulsion Systems’ test facilities in Promontory, Utah, at 7.05 p.m. (Indian standard time) on Tuesday.
The rocket booster is up to 15 percent more powerful than Saturn V was, and far more powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Orbital ATK and NASA will use test measurements from more than 530 data channels to analyze motor performance, acoustics, motor vibrations, nozzle modifications, insulation upgrades, Booster Separation Motor structural dynamic response and nozzle vectoring parameters. That’s the full duration of the burn as if it were launching the Orion capsule into deep space.
Fire and gray smoke billowed from the booster, which lay on the ground during the two-minute test fire in the remote hills of Utah at 11:05 am (1605 GMT).
One of the biggest issues is that of assigned launched missions that will ensure that the SLS is tested many times before a crewed mission to Mars is mounted.
Like the space shuttle, SLS will launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and as such will be exposed to a variety of weather conditions. With liquid propellant engines and two well-built rocket boosters, the liftoff capability of a NASA rocket is extraordinary.
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NASA hopes that astronauts will use the SLS to fly to an asteroid, or maybe even Mars, sometime in the coming decades. “SLS hardware is now in production for every part of the rocket”. That mission, which will journey “thousands of miles beyond the moon” during its three-week mission, will not have humans onboard, but “but it paves the way for future missions with astronauts”.
