NASA transports its lunar mega-rocket to a launch pad

NASA's new giant rocket is ready for its first move to a launch pad this Thursday, to undergo a series of tests that, if successful, will allow it to fly to the Moon this summer.

The SLS rocket will leave the Kennedy Space Center assembly building in Florida at 17:00 (21H00 GMT) and will take eleven hours to arrive, transported by a huge vehicle, to the legendary 39B launch complex, located just over six kilometers away.

- Astronomical cost -

With the Orion capsule at its tip, the SLS rocket is 98 meters tall, more than the Statue of Liberty, but slightly less than the 110 meters of the Saturn V rocket, which sent man to the Moon during the Apollo missions.

However, the SLS will have a thrust of 39.1 meganewtons, 15% more than Saturn V, making it the most powerful rocket in the world.

“It's a symbol of our country,” Tom Whitmeyer, a senior NASA official, told reporters this week.

A symbol, however, accompanied by a bill of 4.1 billion dollars (3.7 billion euros) per launch for the first four Artemis missions to the Moon, the inspector general of the US space agency, Paul Martin, stressed to Congress this month.

Once it arrives at the launch site, engineers will have approximately two weeks to perform a series of tests before a general pre-launch trial.

On April 3, the SLS team will load more than three million liters of cryogenic fuel into the rocket and repeat each stage of the countdown until the last 10 seconds, without starting the engines.

Fuel will then be removed from the rocket for a safe aborted launch demonstration.

- To the Moon and Beyond -

NASA is targeting a first launch window in May for Artemis 1, an unmanned lunar mission that will be the first to combine the SLS rocket and the 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 450,000 km from Earth and nearly 64,000 km beyond the Moon, farther than any other crewable spacecraft.

During its three-week mission, Orion will deploy ten satellites called CubeSats, the size of a shoebox, that will collect information about deep space.

The capsule will move towards the hidden side of the Moon using its propellants provided by the European Space Agency (ESA), and then it will 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, which will take the first woman and the first black person to lunar soil, at the satellite's south pole.

NASA wants to test on the Moon some technologies that it wants to use during its future missions to Mars, in the 2030s.

- SLS o Starship -

With its launch, SLS will enter the category of “super heavy” launchers, for the time being only composed of the Space X Falcon Heavy, which is smaller than the SLS.

Elon Musk's company is developing another rocket for deep space: 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 high, it will have a power 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 reach its final destination directly, while SpaceX plans to place a Starship rocket into orbit and then refuel it with another Starship rocket to extend its range and payload.

NASA has also hired SpaceX for a version of Starship that would be used as a descent vehicle to the moon for Artemis.

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