NASA to Perform Hot-Fire Test of Heavy-Lift Rocket Thursday Written 18 March 2021
Hot fire test in January at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. | Credit: NASA; Aerospace America
Spaceflight Now reports that NASA plans to ignite the core stage of the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket Thursday “to confirm it is ready for shipment to the Kennedy Space Center for launch preparations.” The hot-fire test is scheduled for a two-hour window beginning at 3 p.m. EDT at NASA’s Stennis Space Center on a B-2 stand. The rocket’s “four liquid-fueled Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines will fire for about eight minutes, the same time they will fire when the Space Launch System blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center,” if successful. Once testing is complete, the core stage will be inspected by ground crews before shipment to Florida “for attachment to the rocket’s two side-mounted solid rocket boosters, upper stage, and an Orion capsule the SLS will propel on a mission to the moon.”
Full Story (Spaceflight Now)