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By David Willis (@ThePrimalDino)
At 1:47 AM Eastern Standard time on November 16th, 2022, over a decade of hard work came to fruition. Four RS-25 engines light up on NASA’s launch Pad 39B waiting just moments for the twin 5 segment Solid Rocket boosters to follow suit. The Space Launch System was alive, breathing its first breaths of fire on the launch pad. The Solid Rocket Boosters then ignited,lofting the 5.8-million-pound vehicle off the pad and towards the sky with a tremendous roar, thelikes of which have never been seen or felt before on this planet. A total of 8.8 million pounds of combine thrust pushed the vehicle uphill. Faster and faster, gaining speed the whole while. NASA’s first new rocket in over a decade was heading to space. But it wasn’t always so certain that NASA would ever get to this point. In fact, just over 10 years ago, it was doubtful a NASA vehicle would ever leave the launch pad again... Flashback to the late 2010s. NASA is struggling. Their flagship human spaceflight program, Constellation, is faltering badly. Suffering from the ever-increasing demands of the spacecraft they were trying to develop, in addition to the billions and billions of dollars over budget that the program continued to grow each and every year, NASA was fighting an uphill battle with the most ambitious program they had seen since the Apollo era. And all the while trying to juggle the space shuttle and ISS programs as well. Unfortunately, this balancing act, which was never really balanced at all, would come crashing down. The ever-increasing size of the Orion Spacecraft forced ever more insane design changes to the Ares 1, and the ever-increasing size of the Ares V led to ever more insane changes to the budget of the Constellation Program. This did not last. in the year 2010 the Obama administration did not request any funding for the constellation program. Effectively canceling it outright, and instead sourcing out crew and cargo missions to commercial providers. This right here could have possibly been the definitive end of NASA’s Human Spaceflight program. Following the same steps as Apollo, but with none of the drive or budget tosupport it, NASA could no longer have their own home-grown system, and instead, sourcedeverything out to commercial providers. But this was not to be the case,because NASA had onevery powerful ally in their corner. The United States congress.The united states congress, and specifically some very influential senators andrepresentatives did not like the idea of NASA stepping out of the human spaceflight gamecompletely and would not fund the Obama administration’s plan for a completely commercialfuture for NASA. So, they struck a deal. The Obama Administration would get their Commercial Providers, but only if congress got to keep the Orion Spacecraft, and importantly, got their veryown rocket for NASA to develop. This deal was appealing to all parties involved and was ratified into law as the NASA Authorization act of 2010. With this new course set, NASA got straight to work developing their brand-new Space Launch System rocket. What exactly this rocket was supposed to be wasn’t really defined in the authorization act, but it had to do one really important thing. It needed to send the Orion Spacecraft to the Moon. For this task NASA solicited and looked at several different designs for what this new Space Launch System would potentially be, and eventually they settled on a design that was quite similar to a project that had been in the works since 2006 called Jupiter-DIRECT. Jupiter DIRECT was a plan that proposed taking as much existing shuttle components and infrastructure as possible and optimizing it for an assortment of different missions. NASA’s SLS would be most similar to a stretched version of the Jupiter Rocket and would be optimizedfor sending payloads to the Moon. With a design settled NASA spent the next several years building out hardware andtesting different systems on both Orion and SLS. Orion even went to orbit for the very first time towards the end of the year 2014, on top of a Delta IV H Heavy rocket for the Exploration Flight Test One. Additionally, since SLS was using rocket components directly off of the space shuttle, many pieces of its hardware were ready for flight at or before the year 2017, such as the RS-25and RL10 engines, as well as the Solid rocket boosters, Interim cryogenic propulsion stage, and Orion stage adapter. In fact, most hardware was indeed ready for flight by the year 2017, except for one very crucial part. The one part of the rocket that had little to no heritage at all with anything built before or since. The single largest rocket stage NASA has ever attempted todevelop, the SLS core stage. There are many reasons why the SLS core stage took so long to finally get going, issues with friction stir welders, delays due to damaged hardware for test articles, even a tornado at one point ripped through NASA’s Michoud assembly facility causing immense damage and delays to the program, but throughout it all NASA and the SLS team persevered and at the beginning of2020 NASA rolled out of Michoud, for the first time since the age of Apollo, a brand new Rocket stage. The SLS core stage had officially been completed. But while SLS was finished, it was still well over 2 years away from actually launching, this was because in order to validate rocket for flight, it would need to take a quick detour to NASA’s Stennis space center in Mississippi for a test campaign and static fire. This “quick” detour turned out to be more than a year long endeavor. As many may know, in the year 2020a pandemic struck the world at large. A new virus had been making the rounds that was significantly more dangerous than others that had come before it. This was the Covid-19virus, and even the mighty SLS rocket was stopped in its tracks. What was initially supposed to be a 6-month long test turned out to be well over a year in length due to the covid 19 virus as well as several hurricanes and weather accidents. In fact, SLS had to attempt to static fire two separate times due to the first attempt being cut short. However, SLS persevered and eventually fired up its engines for 8 solid minutes and, when finished, finally headed towards the Kennedy Space Center where it was stacked up, rolled out for testing, and could finally attempt to launch. Attempt being the key word as the first two tries, it was unable to make it to liftoff. However, that third try, that was unbelievably successful. This now brings us to today. SLS has finally launched and according to NASA Artemis I has been a nearly perfect success story. Most rockets have at least a few issues on their inaugural flights. SLS has had zero. From RS-25 ignition all the way up to ICPS separation not a single thing went wrong during the first ever flight of the SLS rocket. In fact, SLS was able to get the Orion spacecraft all the way to the moon as intended. The Orion spacecraft went up towards the Moon, entered into a distant retrograde orbit, swung back by the moon, and splashed down completing its mission, which, just as with SLS, has been incredibly successful. For the past 10 years NASA has been working tirelessly to construct the most powerful rocket they’ve ever worked on. Through tragedy and triumph, they have persevered and never once gave up on their goal of returning to the Moon. Admittedly it looked rough during the late part of the Constellation program, and the early part of the SLS program, but now with this first mission (almost) under their belt, it is safe to say that NASA is back in the front seat of human exploration, ready to pioneer the next era of human spaceflight. And SLS and Orion will be the vehicle that takes us into that bold new era.
You can watch an interview and Q&A session with David Willis (the author of this article) below! He is currently working on a book about the SLS, which he hopes will be released in around two years.