NEW ORLEANS — NASA is building a jumbo rocket. It’s called the Space Launch System, or simply the SLS. The core stage of the SLS is slowly materializing in a sprawling facility on the outskirts of the city. Technicians are welding up a storm and have completed the largest component — a liquid hydrogen fuel tank that’s 133 feet from nose to tail and looks like a shiny metallic zeppelin.
“This is our big boy,” said NASA engineer Stephen C. Doering, dwarfed by the tank resting on cradles in a high bay.
NASA has a complicated way of building rockets that funnels money to multiple states in the southeastern United States. The SLS program is based in Alabama, at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Engine tests will be done in Mississippi, at the Stennis Space Center. The final stacking of the rocket and the launch will be from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at the Kennedy Space Center.
Construction of the core stage is handled here in Louisiana, at the Michoud Assembly Facility, which covers the equivalent of 31 football fields. The vast structure survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and then a direct hit from a tornado earlier this year.
But the new rocket will have to survive the unpredictable crosswinds of Washington.
President Trump is now in charge of the space program, and no one in Washington seems to have a clear idea what’s going to happen next. Trump has expressed interest in President John F. Kennedy’s vow in 1961 to put American astronauts on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Thus everyone expects Trump to try to create a “Kennedy moment.”
The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing is coming up in two years. For NASA, and the entire space industry, that’s a huge anniversary — and suddenly everyone seems to be talking about moon missions.
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