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ORLANDO, Fla., March 17 (UPI) – NASA’s towering lunar rocket, the SLS, is expected to emerge from its assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday to offer a fresh look at the agency’s largest spacecraft since the Apollo era.
NASA held a day of events and media opportunities at the Space Center, leading up to the rollout at 5:30 p.m. EDT. The rollout comes as NASA prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 mission, which was launched on April 16, 1972.
Thousands of spectators gathered along the route of the rocket before its rollout, including NASA staff, contractors and their families.
The historical significance of the moment is clear to astronauts and anyone working on the massive rocket, astronaut Randy Bresnick told UPI in an interview Thursday at the Space Center.
“To see this beautiful beast from the spaceship Kokon, so to speak, to get out of a building built for lunar rockets – that’s exciting and so important,” Bresnick said as he looked at the jeep’s high-rise door where the SLS will arise.
Bresnick flew in 2009 with the shuttle Atlantis and on a Russian soybean capsule to the International Space Station. He is not assigned a flight to SLS but he said all astronauts hope for the chance.
He said the space shuttle was an impressive vehicle, but much shorter than the Apollo rockets, while SLS is only about 40 feet shorter than the Apollo-era Saturn Vs.
“Overall, I expect the ride on SLS to be smoother than the shuttle because the shuttle had wings and was mounted on the side of the fuel tank,” Bresnick said. “SLS will be nasty as the solid boosters burn, but after that it’s just an aerodynamic capsule and abrasion module on top of the fuel tank.”
If all goes according to NASA’s schedule, the rocket will remain at launch site, Complex 39A, until a fully powered test in early April. NASA hopes to launch the rocket, without crew, on and around the moon in May.
Thursday’s rollout is just the beginning of Artemis-era activities at the starting lineup. NASA already has three Orion capsules and two more SLS rockets under construction in preparation for launching the people to the next Artemis mission, said Jeremy Parsons, NASA Deputy Program Manager for Exploration Ground Systems, UPI.
“We want to make sure this vehicle is very safe for astronauts to put on the moon,” Parsons said. “We tested it and even burned the engines, and now we want to make sure everything works in this integrated environment.”
He said NASA crews monitor sensors everywhere on the rocket for vibration impact during the rollout, to make sure it arrives safely after its slow journey, which is expected to take up to 12 hours to reach a few miles of VAB on the pad cover.
The space agency has long planned to return to the moon and even astronauts to fly to Mars, but since 2004 such plans have met on repeated delays and lack of necessary funding from Congress.
The rocket fully assembled and seen at launch site is an exciting milestone for NASA staff and contractors, said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, at a news conference Monday.
“It will be something really special for me, and I know for everyone who has worked on it, if we get a chance to see it,” she said.
The rollout will be the first time a NASA rocket so large – 322 feet tall – has moved to a launch site since the Apollo 17 Saturn V rocket did so before launching astronauts to the moon later in 1972.
Space shuttles also played the same role of the VAB at launch from 1981 to 2011, but the new lunar rocket will tower over the shuttle height, which was 184 feet when it was stacked on its large outer fuel tank.
The Artemis I mission is to fly farther along the moon than any spaceship designed for humans in history.
The International Space Station was photographed by the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavor during an orbit flight that took place on November 8 after the dismantling of the Harmony module’s space shuttle. Photo with NASA.
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