NASA Green Run Hot Fire Set for Later Today
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. (NASA PR) — NASA is targeting a two-hour test window that opens at 3 p.m. EDT Thursday, March 18, for the second hot fire test of the core stage for the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
The agency plans to begin live coverage on NASA Television, the agency’s website, and the NASA app approximately 30 minutes before the hot fire. The team will refine the timeline as it proceeds through operations. NASA will provide updates on the operations and the target hot fire time at @NASA and the Artemis blog.
On test day, engineers will power up all the core stage systems, load more than 700,000 gallons of cryogenic, or supercold, propellant into the tanks, and fire the rocket’s four RS-25 engines at the same time to simulate the stage’s operation during launch, generating 1.6 million pounds of thrust.
A post-test briefing will follow on NASA Television approximately two hours after the test.
The hot fire is the eighth and final test of the Green Run series to ensure the core stage of the SLS rocket is ready to launch Artemis missions to the Moon, beginning with Artemis I. The core stage includes the liquid hydrogen tank and liquid oxygen tank, four RS-25 engines, as well as the computers, electronics, and avionics that serve as the “brains” of the rocket.
The first in a series of increasingly complex missions, Artemis I will test the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as an integrated system ahead of crewed flights to the Moon. Under the Artemis program, NASA is working to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon to pave the way for sustainable exploration at the Moon and future missions to Mars.
For more information about the Green Run test series, visit:
68 responses to “NASA Green Run Hot Fire Set for Later Today”
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We are going back to the Moon. To stay. If only they would drop the Mars after the Moon fools errand. Mars is a dead end. Ceres is the better destination. https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I don’t see any reason that the Starship fleet can’t eventually go to both Mars and Ceres.
I note the word “fleet” in your comment. Something the SLS is totally incapable of becoming. Even if it wasn’t likely to be cancelled due to cost, safety, and schedule problems.
A spacex fanboy talking about safety…what a joke!
SLS is likely to have a better safety record than SpaceX in perpetuity. That’s because it’s going to be canceled before it has a chance to kill anyone.
Fantasy.
Making Senator Nelson NASA Administrator will ensure the survive of the SLS for the duration of the Biden Administration. SpaceX will need to find commercial customers to fly to the Moon, perhaps the reporters covering the test flights of the SLS/Orion. ?
Cancellation in four years after (optimistically) four flights then.
And agree on the need for commercial customers under any scenario.
I’d say more like cancellation in two years after a single flight. If Nelson chooses to play Sisyphus with the SLS boulder, he’s just going to get squished.
SLS is never going to have any commercial customers. It has the worst economics of any rocket ever built. I don’t think it would even be legal to offer it on the commercial market – not, as I said, that doing so would garner any takers.
I was going with the suggestion that Nelson would prevent cancellation.
And commercial was meant for commercial companies. SLS will be too unreliable for commercial payloads even if received 100% cost subsidy.
That may or may not be what he chooses to try to do. It is far from obvious that he can succeed, though, even should he choose to try.
Maybe he will even be the “Nixon-to-China” figure some here are trying to paint him as. Never say never, I suppose. There are certainly examples of people formerly responsible for much mischief doing 180s later in life. Mike Griffin comes to mind. If Nelson proves to be another, I will happily cheer.
Of course you don’t. You only see what fanboys are capable of, which does not go much past the spacex website.
Not with that thing we’re not.
Going right down the page trolling me. Same as always. Disgusting Trumpist fanboy creep.
It was perfect. Unlike that other company that keeps blowing up their test articles. Go Artemis!
Congrats to Boeing. But…in case you hadn’t noticed…they haven’t actually launched anything yet.
Or analyzed the data to see if there are any gremlins that can’t be lived with.
When the SLS lifts off for the Moon the world will give the U.S. a standing ovation- except those who hate America.
lol start practicing.
Yes, everything you cannot wrap your fanboy head around is to be trivialized, mocked, and denigrated. Go fly your bus Oler. I am not impressed.
Quite a bit of the world seems to hate the U.S. – at least on Twitter. The tens of thousands who keep trying to sneak over the border, maybe not so much.
That said, it’s hard to see why much of anyone – foreign or domestic – would applaud an insanely expensive steam-punk-ish big disposable rocket when a far more capable Heinlein-esque vehicle had already launched months before.
Right down the page trolling every single one of my comments. Disgusting creep as always.
In case you hadn’t noticed, those engines have gone into Earth orbit several times, and the SRB’s are just extra segments for what fired flawlessly several hundred times.
True…ten long…long…long years ago. I’m afraid that there’s some frost on that pumpkin.
Which, among other things, puts the likely reliability of SLS somewhere below New Glen and Vulcan. Starship will have more teething problems due to pushing the envelop on new technologies as well as the serious test philosophy of the company. Though I would put SLS well behind that after single digit flights.
The US is in a great position right now when it comes to heavy lift. We’re in a space race with ourselves. No matter who wins, we win. I think it was Prof Matula who a few years ago mused that SLS was going to develop the heavy lift market for what was to become SS/SH. I think history is going to prove him right.
Those are good points I hadn’t considered. A doomed porker program might end up as having served as the goad to get others moving.
Though I will say that I am wait and see on how SS/SH turn out. In my guess, that will take some longer and cost more in operations than many suggest. If in a decade, SS/SH can do monthly turnarounds instead of daily, and cost $20M a flight instead of the projected $2M, that will constitute a massive win. Even better would be if there is serious competition on their six to keep them motivated.
Right now there are no payloads for SS/SH to fly. By the time they’re ready to deliver payloads to orbit, most if not all of Starlink will be deployed. These super boosters need super payloads. Given all the worlds payloads right now I’ll bet either 1 or 2 SS/SH launches could take up the entire planet’s payloads. Nobody, including SpaceX is making payloads that large going to energetic orbits.
The real question is how long will SpaceX be the focus of the world’s irrational exuberance when it comes to investing. None of Musk’s products make enough money from pure operations to pay for his development cycles. Likely Starlink won’t either. If it does, than it will be his first product to do so.
These are concerns that superfans need to bear in mind. The time requirements to ramp up demand need to be somewhat in step with the ramp up in required ROI. Most of us can think of physical uses for the uplift capability. Far less know how to leverage that capability into a profitable scenario that is financially self sustaining. I can certainly handwave a profitable tourism market myself, but unfortunately, I am aware that I am just handwaving.
The process you outline is the key problem when opening up a new frontier. It seems to me that frontiers are a collection of hand waving unprofitable enterprises that almost all fail. But there seems to be a interlocking collection of them. And Musk does that. It’s both good, and bad. I think the hand waiving unprofitable scheme to add to the stack is decarbonizing the energy sector. Space based solar feeds a politically popular desire right now, would give plenty of work to SS/SH, and provide a new baseload power source to our energy portfolio. It’s by all means not a all up win, but no set of enterprises are when you’re opening a new frontier.
Sure. Failure was why John Jacob Astor was the Jeff Bezos of his day. And who remembers Wells Fargo or Levi Strauss & Co. or Union Pacific after all these years?
There’s a lot to be taken care of before resting any significant percentage of Earth’s baseload electrical generating capacity on giant solar power sats makes sense. Probably the biggest such obstacle, anent using Starship as an implementation means, is that Elon Musk is a major non-fan of the whole idea.
There’s no need for “hand-waving” as SpaceX is already solidly profitable except for Starlink and Starship. That’s what all the investment rounds are for. Once both start contributing in a major way to the bottom line, there will be other projects to finance the same way, not least the settlement of Mars. This is how Bezos built Amazon. It’s no accident that the two men who have been most successful applying this business model are also the two richest men on the planet.
I don’t disagree with much of what you say here, only that de carbonizing the energy sector will not be a step function with coal and methane getting killed on one fell swoop. Coal is already becoming a fossil fossil fuel. And there’s always going to be a need for a set of methane power plants just to deal with waste methane.
Coal is becoming a “fossil fossil fuel” in the United States because of gas fracking. In the rest of the world, not so’s you’d notice.
Andrew. what do you think Starships real payload is…and by that I mean what do you think that real useful payload is that can be sent to orbit with one launch and no refueling?
The main one is likely to be Starlink birds – both new deployments and replacements. These get dumped out at about 250 km altitude so no refueling should be required for the Starships doing these missions.
If SpaceX decides, at some point, to dispense with the initial low deployment orbits – due, say, to increasing reliability of the birds – refueling could allow full payloads to be deployed directly at operational altitudes. That would be strictly a financial decision and done only if the greater promptness of revenue generation by the new birds exceeds the cost of the refueling. I suspect that’s how things will actually play out fairly soon.
If high energy reentry is a normal part of the design, then 40,000 lbs to GEO tells me Starship will first make money deploying GEO birds in groups of 4. Also, because it comes back, it will pick up work retrieving spent satellites in the Clarke Belt. Esp military birds that don’t want to be inspected by the Chinese or Russians. They could also retrieve GEO birds for refueling and maybe relaunch, but that would entail some surgery. All those are existing options for existing payloads.
As a reaction to SS/SH but excluding tanking. I see large aperture monolithic heavy, low tech, space telescopes. Ultra large GEO birds, and constellation deployment as it’s second batch of payloads.
Except for an initial flurry of trash removal missions in the GEO and the GEO graveyard orbits, I don’t think GEO payloads of the conventional type are going to be much more than a niche business for Starship.
In any case, GEO payloads don’t meet the main criterion Bob asked you for – payloads Starship can take to LEO without refueling. Some constellations will probably meet this criterion, but by no means all. Perhaps not even Starlink after awhile.
Big, but inexpensive, telescopes are certainly a possibility. But, not, I would think, in any of the LEO constellation belts. Once decades of accumulated trash in GEO is tidied up, that would be a better orbit in which to place them. But, again, not without refueling.
Take to LEO without refueling? Why would you refuel in LEO, if your flight was to LEO? LEO is the place SS/SH has burlesque performance to. Refueling only makes sense for high orbits from which Starship needs even more propellant than the boost up given the need to come back down and at least begin aerobraking. 40k Lbs to GEO with return capability is substantial, and the return capability makes it unique.
Been skipping our Bullshit Anonymous meetings have we?
Starship will be operational for Starlink deployments within two years – maybe within one. Starlink birds will be replaced every five years so the constellation will never be finished. And it will be much larger, not too far down the road, than the next year or so of Falcon 9 deployment missions will be able to handle.
As with Starlink, SpaceX is already planning terrestrial P2P service with people as payload. I think it inevitable that orbital space tourism and orbital resort space stations will soon follow as other profit centers buildable using Starship.
Even looking at today’s payloads, it’s the bigsats that are stagnant and the smallsats that are breeding like flies. Rideshare suppliers in every size range have no problem filling their missions.
It’s true that SpaceX’s operational profits do not cover its development activities. But that does not mean those operating profits are small – they aren’t. But, whatever their size, they don’t have to cover the entire development bill as SpaceX has also proved adept at attracting investment. That will continue to be true for the foreseeable future.
Must have been Robert or some other Boeing fan as there is no market for the SLS other than the one NASA mandates for it. It’s only real function is to launch an Orion capsule that was designed to be too heavy for any other launch vehicle.
By contrast SS/SH is designed first to replace the Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy, first for Starlink launches, then other satellites, then deep space missions, then for human space flight. SpaceX should be able to do multiple launches for the price of a single RL-25 throw away engine.
Of course there’s no market for SLS or any of its payloads. That’s why the government does such things. Just as there was no market for commercial use of turbojets or trans-continental steam trains until the government supported the sectors until they were viable. Geezh, I feel like I’m regurgitating arguments you made years ago.
As for the evolutionary path of SS/SH, I think the argument you gave a few days ago about intent vs reality is going to come true. We don’t really know what’s going come of it.
Tom is putting something on me, I have never said. I have been an SLS opponent from the word go
the problem as you know with the turbojet analogy, is that NASA right now seems to be several generations behind both technology and the cost curves
There’s a considerable market for super-heavy lift, just not for SLS. There was also a considerable market for commercial turbojets. The De Havilland Comet and Boeing 707 were both built in vastly greater numbers for commercial markets than for government/military ones. Meanwhile, the British government was backing the Bristol Brabizon.
Railroads, like steamships, were also a private sector innovation. The Transcontinental Railroad project happened decades after railroads had become well-established. The government wanted it for military reasons, just as the DoD, nine decades later, wanted the Interstate Highway system.
One of the disturbing data points on heavy lift is the Falcon Heavy. Available right now, and limited demand.
Especially since those RS-25 throw-away engines now cost more per unit than the reusable originals.
Anything not spacex must be qualified as some kind of failure- it is what you and the rest of the thugs squatting here are. Been that way on these forums for ten long…long…long years.
I actually hope to see SLS and Orion fly. But at one launch a year and two billion bucks a launch I just don’t think they’ll get the job done.
Riiiight….you actually hope but just don’t think.
Other than the fascination akin to watching a wreck, I don’t even care about SLS anymore. It obviously is not capable of moving Spaceflight forward and is unlikely to prevent it either in the long run.
I’m 70 now, and would like to see just about anything fly to space…even wrecks.
I will respect your preferences.
Thanks. At this point in my life…since I have had no success in wishing SLS away…I might as well kick back and enjoy the ride.
Heh.
Probably closer to a launch every other year once the extent of Artemis delays becomes known.
Not anything, just SLS and Orion. And probably ULA a few more years down the road.
Replying to every single one of my comments–blatant trolling.
And not so flawlessly once.
We’ve also noticed that those quasi-durable engines will now reap their reward by sleeping with the fishes.
Disgusting troll.
And yet that “other company” will most likely beat SLS off the pad with their new rocket.
Disgusting fanboy Trumpist troll.
Well done NASA and contractors. Such a shame all that hardware is thrown away.
Still no hard evidence that reuse breaks even. If it costs more to reuse why do it? Not a shame at all. What is shameful is the decade of NewSpace scream-cheap brainwashing that has been working directly against any progress. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
There is abundant such evidence that it not only breaks even, but is quite profitable. The biggest chunk is that SpaceX continues to reuse boosters instead of building a lot more new ones. Smaller chunks of such evidence are all the other NewSpace launcher builders looking to implement reusability ASAP. Then there are the Russians, Europeans and Chinese, all of whom have been hammered by SpaceX and, however reluctantly, now see their dooms approaching if they do not follow suit.
Practical reusability is the biggest single index of progress in spaceflight – manned or unmanned – of the past decade.
The “worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration” would probably be you if you actually had any influence. Fortunately, you don’t.
Ouch! Maybe Richard is onto something. Maybe Elon is trying to trick us all with his devious reuse scam. Maybe he can fool the Russians, Europeans and Chinese. But…he can’t fool Richard.
Blah blah going right down the page trolling every single one of my comments. What childish disgusting little creep.
As Emily Litella would say “Never Mind”.
Looks like it only made it to the 60 second mark. I did hear an Engine 4 MCF callout prior to shutdown. Hope whatever the major component failure was its not too severe.I’ll bet you were watching a recording of the first attempt. YouTube kept trying to serve that to me too. No surprise given how many historical films I watch on it.
Hi Andrew, you are 100% correct! I got home and pulled up the wrong replay! Thanks for the catch and apologies to all. Congratulations to the NASA Artemis team and look forward to seeing the full stack roll out of the VAB.