NASA to Test Powerful Rocket Booster

[kevindavis007]

A massive fireball will light up the northern Utah town of Promontory Tuesday as NASA tests its SLS rocket booster.


It's going to be scorching hot in northern Utah on Tuesday as NASA tests a booster for its powerful Space Launch System (SLS).


The SLS is the world's most powerful rocket, and will lift NASA's deep-space Orion crew vehicle into space, carrying astronauts to destinations like Mars and near-Earth asteroids. Last year, it fired up the SLS booster for the very first time, producing 3.6 million pounds of thrust (and a massive fireball) in two minutes of awesome; check it out in the video below.


Now it's ready for test No. 2 at a facility owned by commercial partner Orbital ATK in Promontory, Utah. Watch live on NASA TV at 10:05 a.m. EDT Tuesday morning. A pre-show begins at 9:30 a.m. and a post-test news conference is scheduled for 11 a.m. A live video stream is embedded below.


"In 2015, NASA completed the critical design review – a first for a NASA exploration class vehicle in almost 40 years—and continues to move forward with production of the launch vehicle," NASA says on its SLS site. "Engineers are making rapid progress aimed toward delivering the first SLS rocket to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its first launch. Flight hardware is currently in production for every element."


After tomorrow, NASA will not fire the booster against until 2018, when it's strapped to the Orion spacecraft for what will be known as Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1). 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."


"This is a mission that truly will do what hasn't been done and learn what isn't known," Mike Sarafin, EM-1 mission manager at NASA Headquarters said in November. "It will blaze a trail that people will follow on the next Orion flight, pushing the edges of the envelope to prepare for that mission."


Source: http://www.interstellar-news.net/2016/06/nasa-to-test-powerful-rocket-booster.html

[roamer_1]

Ah, crap. Ithought the title said NASCAR... 

[Chieftain]

The Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters were made up of four solid fuel segments.  These babies have five.  Lots more thrust and duration of burn. 

The SLS will use two of these babies and four improved Space Shuttle Main Engines.  When you don't have to worry about re-using the engine you can do things to it to significantly boost the power. 

Apollo 4 was the first all-up unmanned launch of the Saturn V launch vehicle.  The acoustic energy from the launch was so intense that it pretty much destroyed the old Cape press building.  When they finally launch the SLS for the first time it should be even louder than the Saturn V was...

Cool stuff....

 

[geronl]

I can't believe they are only test firing this thing twice before they use it for real.

[Oceander]

This is good, but while we're at it we should be designing and building replacements for the Russian engines we buy to get to the space station and put things into orbit.

[Chieftain]

This is good, but while we're at it we should be designing and building replacements for the Russian engines we buy to get to the space station and put things into orbit.

We're trying to do just that, but the simple fact remains that the Russians build very good rocket engines. 

[EC]

It's the difference in approach. Americans go for complex, Russians go for brute force engineering. Plus they have had some truly inspired designers over the years.

[Chieftain]

It's the difference in approach. Americans go for complex, Russians go for brute force engineering. Plus they have had some truly inspired designers over the years.

Yep...they managed to engineer one hell of a good turbopump that can withstand cryogenic oxygen on one end, an super-hot turbine in the middle and essentially room temperature RP-1 grade kerosene on the other.  Building anything to hold up to that kind of thermal stress is one thing, but having it produce 700 bar propellant pressures is amazing. 

The Russians didn't try to build an enormous engine like the F-1 and F-2 boosters we build for the Saturn V.  They went with a good pump feeding two or four combustion chambers instead.  The SLS system first stage booster burns LOX & Hydrogen, and the only way to do that is to supercool the nozzle by routing all of the liquid hydrogen through the nozzle cooling passages before it is injected into the combustion chamber.  The Russians never mastered that kind of technology, so the went with the smaller nozzles that do not need cooling but still produce impressive thrust.

I'm always amazed at how complex the ass end of a Soyuz launch vehicle is; each booster and the core have four combustion nozzles, a pair of steering rockets (the core stage has four) along with the nozzle exhaust for the five main turbopumps and the APUs.  The Soyuz has a very impressive track record and is a workhorse launch vehicle for the Russians and the Europeans.  It also makes an incredible noise on ascent.

Nothing has ever beat one of our F-1's though...comparing engines burning RP-1/LOX, the F-1 is still the most powerful rocket engine ever flown.

 

[Oceander]

We're trying to do just that, but the simple fact remains that the Russians build very good rocket engines. 

The Russians are pretty good at building robust systems that get the basic job done.

[Chieftain]

The Russians are pretty good at building robust systems that get the basic job done.

The Soviet Union had a way of doing that with The People's Rocket Factory that had plenty of funding to try and beat the Capitalists, and in many ways they did, but they could not get to the moon.

Their methods of development are very different from NASA.  NASA tests individual components over and over again before attempting an all-up system test.  The Soviets relied on flight testing of their entire vehicle as a whole, in large part because they lacked the technological sophistication to run a complex testing regimen.  Their moon program was to have 17 unmanned test flights before they would pack a crew on and send the 18th mission all the way.  Their approach was a catastrophic failure over and over again until they finally terminated the program.

Interesting history....