NASA chief Jim Brindestine declined to call the prematurely terminated test a failure. “Today was a good day – we have a lot of data to work with,” he said. According to him, it is possible that the rocket will make its first flight according to plans in November this year. “Before we put American astronauts in an American rocket, everything must be flawless,” the NASA chief added.
The engine test took place at Stennis Space Center on Saturday evening of local time (Saturday before midnight CET). The RS-25 engines, developed in collaboration with Boeing, were ignited and then ran for a minute and 15 seconds before being shut down again due to an unspecified error. During that time, the engines consumed over 2.5 million liters of fuel.
“The reason for the error message could be any parameter that deviated during engine operation,” said SLS missile project manager John Honeycutt.
The massive SLS rocket is a key part of the new American research program of the Moon, called Artemis. It will consist of three stages. The first (Artemis 1) will be an unmanned flight of the new ship Orion around the Moon and back to Earth. The second stage (Artemis 2) will be the same flight of Orion around the Moon, but with a human crew. The third stage (Artemis 3) involves sending astronauts to the Moonway space station near the Moon, and later, tentatively in 2024, envisages the first woman and another man landing on the moon. By 2028, NASA expects long-term research on the moon.
This gradually evolving Artemis program will then be a preparation for sending people to Mars. The development of the new SLS missile is now three years behind schedule. Compared to the original schedule, the budget was exceeded by three billion dollars, Reuters reported.
Critics are trying to convince NASA that it should prefer the services of commercial companies such as SpaceX or the United Launch Alliance, which are much cheaper. One launch of the SLS will cost about one billion dollars (22 billion crowns), while the launch of a slightly less powerful Falcon Heavy rocket costs about 90 million dollars (two billion crowns).
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