(futuristic dramatic music)
(rocket engines sizzling)
NASA certainly was the shiny light,
the benchmark of American aspirations in the '60s.
The large Saturn V rocket, the Lunar Rover,
the little moon buggy,
all of that was something that I wanted to do
when I got older.
I wanted to put people on the moon.
I wanted to put people on Mars.
We leave as we came,
and God willing as we shall return.
I joined NASA in 1976 during the early development
of the Space Shuttle Program.
Preflare maneuvering
will pull the nose up a little bit,
right before it hits the runway.
The Space Shuttle became that goal of low-costs
to low Earth orbit.
I always felt like it was an interim period
in our history.
(rocket engines blasting)
To me, NASA's role was always to go deep into space.
Thank you. (audience clapping)
A little more than 40 years ago,
astronauts descended the nine rung ladder
of the lunar module called LEM.
When President Obama made the announcement in 2010
that NASA's role is deep space.
The question for us now
is whether that was the beginning of something
or the end of something?
We were all excited.
I choose to believe it was only the beginning.
It's definitely a Kennedy moment
when you can say, "We're gonna do
"something that's never been done before,
"not only go to the moon, but onto Mars."
I was in high school when Barack Obama made the speech.
So for me, I looked at it as an opportunity
to be able to have my footprint
in human exploration history.
Permanent presence on the moon,
people have dreamed of this for years.
The Obama decision kind of lit a little fire
that has gotten bigger.
Going back to the moon and going to Mars,
that's my generation of engineers who are gonna be
the pioneers to send humans to Mars.
(dramatic music)
For some of us that have only known low Earth orbit,
it was a daunting idea.
It told us that we were gonna need
a tremendously large rocket.
(dramatic music)
The magnitude, both in power and in size.
Not just heavy lift, but super heavy lift.
(rocket engines blasting)
It's NASA, most powerful rocket ever,
a machine built to allow humanity
to explore the moon and beyond.
(upbeat music)
This is the story of the mighty Space Launch System, or SLS.
(dramatic music)
With a Space Launch System, the stars are our destination.
(dramatic music)
But we haven't developed anything like SLS
in, literally, 40 years.
(dramatic music) (rocket engines blasting)
And so we're having to start from scratch on,
"Hey, how do we get to the moon?
"What do we need?"
(dramatic music) (rocket engines blasting)
The questions that arise are,
who has the expertise even to do the same thing,
but also to do it better or differently?
(dramatic music)
(pondering music)
July, 2013,
NASA has preliminary plans for the Space Launch System,
a rocket designed initially to take astronauts
back to the moon on a mission
that will come to be called Artemis.
Engineers need to create a machine that surpasses
the legendary Saturn V,
the rocket that launched the Apollo moon missions.
But no one has built a rocket that powerful
in over 40 years.
(pondering music)
We had nobody that had hands-on experience
of a rocket like that.
But we had a young cadre of engineers
who really wanted to get their hands dirty.
We really didn't have a lot of hands-on experience
in working with these large scale engines.
So one of the ideas they had was to take apart
a Saturn V first stage engine.
This new F1 must perform perfectly,
for more than just time and money are involved:
men's lives will depend on it.
Why don't we go get one of the F1 engines
out of the Smithsonian and a tear it down
and reverse engineer it.
We just said, "Hey, let's get a big crane
"and let's pick it up and go put it
"into a big building and let's start taking it apart
"and seeing what made it tick?"
(pondering music)
It did have a few pieces of bubblegum
from being in the museum and some kids walking by
and sticking some bubblegum on the side of it,
but it was still in really good shape.
(pondering music)
When we started to dig into it and take it apart
there was still kerosine, there was still rocket fuel
left in it from when it was tested back in the '60s.
So to touch it, to smell it,
to get the soot that was still on the turbine blades,
it was just a, it just hit every sense in your body.
The pride that someone had put into making these complicated
and difficult welds, and they were all done by hand.
To me as an engineer,
if you wanna look at how well something's made
you go look the welds,
and every one of those on those rockets is flawless.
(pondering music)
What we ended up with, really,
is a team of hands-on engineers that were young
and not ready to retire,
and they wanted to go actually do this.
Saturn V may have been the inspiration,
but for most of the SLS design,
NASA turns to a more recent launch system.
The Space Launch System is a combination of new and old,
and actually quite a bit of old.
And the Shuttle has cleared the tower.
Legacy parts inherited were not just
from the Apollo program,
but actually from the Shuttle era,
which, I think, is maybe more relevant.
(rocket engines blasting)
Saturn V is the grandparent of SLS
and Space Shuttle is the parent.
SLS will use modified
Space Shuttle main engines and enlarge versions
of it's Solid Rocket Boosters, pushing them to the limit,
using modern digital technology.
We have taken the Space Shuttle,
we've taken the orbiter off of the side of it,
we've put the orbiter's engines under the bottom
of the vehicle.
We've lengthened the Solid Rocket Booster,
and we've stretched the tank to get more fuel on board.
(dramatic music)
It sounds really simple,
(dramatic music)
but there was much more complexity to doing that
than first meets the eye.
(dramatic music)
With a new team in place
engineering for SLS is underway,
(engines firing)
and the first step is an essential data gathering mission.
How do we use parts that were intended for one purpose
and apply them in a different environment?
Air dynamics is a huge part of building any launch vehicle.
We do test models in wind tunnels
up to around 13-feet long.
(light dramatic music)
(dramatic music)
One of the key areas we test first is this area of flow
that we call transonic, and shockwave start to occur.
This compression of air molecules at different parts
of the rocket.
(dramatic music)
One of the complexities of SLS is due to its extreme size,
the larger the structure, the lower its natural frequencies.
(dramatic music)
When you go through the transonic region,
shocks are trying to form on the side of the vehicle.
(upbeat music)
Then you have to worry about coupling up that dynamic
with the natural frequency of the vehicle.
And when I say coupling,
I mean that the frequency at which I'm pulsing it,
is also the frequency that the structure wants to respond,
and so they're having a good time with each other.
In the engineering world, positive reinforcement
is usually bad.
(rocket engines blasting)
Those kinds of dynamics you can literally break things,
you can cause pulses that even influence
the thrust of the rocket engine.
Using a combination of aerodynamic
and acoustic testing engineers reach a troubling conclusion.
Early on we realized that these parts
that we inherited from the Legacy Shuttle Program
really were not capable of flying through transonic.
(dramatic music)
Rocket components are not universal.
They're all designed and optimized
for the vehicle that they are built for.
Space Launch System has four engines,
the Shuttle only had three engines.
Space Shuttle had them
on the back of the actual plane itself.
For Space Launch System,
we put them at the bottom of the borough.
(dramatic music)
So on Space Launch System now,
those components are gonna experience
much more violent vibrations.
So the size requires, as a propulsion engineer,
requires us to make sure that those parts
can withstand the new vibration, the new loads.
We took those original components from the Space Shuttle,
and we had to make them thicker and beefier
to deal with the weight and the structural movements
and the size of the Space Launch System.
(dramatic music)
(pondering music)
Beginning in 2013,
the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans,
a vital part of the Space Shuttle Program
must be extensively refitted to cope with the size of SLS.
But by November, 2014,
the first pieces of the SLS core stage
are coming out of the factory.
(upbeat music)
The 8.4 meter diameter is exactly the diameter
of the external tank on Space Shuttle,
but we've stretched the tank to get more fuel on board.
The core stage diameter is the same as what we flew
on Shuttle, but that was really not driven
as much by vehicle architecture
as by taking advantage of existing tooling
and infrastructure capabilities.
If I can use the same machines,
I don't have to buy new ones.
The core stage is the biggest stage
that we've ever built, and in fact,
the hydrogen tank is the biggest tank
we've ever built.
Each tank is made in sections,
joined together by a technique called friction stir welding,
a spinning tool heats up the metal of the two edges
until they become soft and stirs them together
like mixing dough.
The resultant joint is strong and light,
but refining the process to ensure defect-free welds
was a challenge.
We pushed the technology of friction stir welding
with this tank.
I don't think anybody's ever seen anything like it before.
(light upbeat music)
With SLS, NASA is pushing at the limits
of what is possible because there's a fundamental reality
that governs all rockets.
(rocket engines blasting)
You have this thing called gravity,
yet, we have to overcome that and go beyond.
Behind every aspect of the SLS design
is a single mathematical formula.
In order to understand how a rocket actually works
we have the the rocket equation.
Oh, to me, the rocket equation,
you know, you might as well just tattoo that on my arm.
It's what makes makes all this work.
(rocket engines blasting) (dramatic music)
You're looking at the incremental effects
of how you're releasing mass in order to achieve
an escape velocity.
You know, it's Newton's law: reaction and reaction,
you're throwing out at fast speeds
a lot of dense propellant.
You wanna take your mass and you accelerate it,
then it produces force, right.
The real crux of the matter of the rocket equation
is I want most of the weight of my vehicle to be propellant.
It puts you in a little bit of a box
because I'm trying to get more and more fuel on board
that my tanks are getting bigger and bigger.
Now I'm fighting the weight of the structure itself.
Every ounce of weight that I change greatly impacts
the bottom line of the rocket.
There is a risk you'd have a vehicle that's too heavy
and might not have enough propellant.
And the rocket equation would get you again,
and you'd run out of steam before you got to orbit
The rocket equation, you know,
the part that we focus on is the part we can control, right,
it's a physics-based equation,
and so we can control the fuel economy
and how do we optimize the mass?
I don't wanna say minimize the mass,
I wanna say optimize the mass because it takes mass
to build a structure that can handle the loads
that we put it through.
(pondering music)
And there is a limit to how big you can make something.
(pondering music)
In April, 2017, the first completed section
of the core stage begins a 1,240 mile journey,
from New Orleans to Alabama.
The engine section test article will be carried on
NASA's Pegasus barge to the Marshall Space Flight Center.
There, it will undergo structural tests
to ensure it can withstand the forces
created by 8.8 million pounds of thrust at launch.
(dramatic music)
Many, many different components of the Space Launch System
lie within that one engine section.
I would even say about 80% of the parts
that go into the core stage is in the engine section.
(dramatic music)
It's one of the most important segments of the core stage
for the Space Launch System,
because it attaches the RS-25 engines.
(dramatic music)
16 Shuttle main engines were leftover
after the Shuttle program ended in 2011 called RS-25s.
They already have a proven track record.
(pondering music)
The RC-25 engine, it's a seasoned veteran,
it's been aging well like wine, right,
it gets better as we age it
'cause we implement improvements.
(pondering music)
For a car guy I would say they are the Rolls Royces
and the Ferrari together as an engine.
I have to put this in there as well.
They also have a little Prius built in there. (laughs)
(light dramatic music)
In 2014 NASA begins shipping all 16 engines
to Stennis Space Center where they must be refitted
for Space Launch System.
We needed to adapt those engines, it's a different rocket.
There were interfaces that had to be dealt with,
physical, mechanical interfaces, hydraulics, gases,
propellant, a lot of things to think about.
The engines burn liquid hydrogen
and oxygen to create superheated water that exits the nozzle
at 13 times the speed of sound, creating huge thrust.
When we first started on the Shuttle
our engines ran at, call it designed thrust, a 100%.
(light dramatic music)
Vehicle guys always want more power.
(rocket engines blasting)
Going to the SLS,
the first flight will be at 109, not 100%.
(rocket engines blasting)
Eventually we're gonna go to higher power liberals, 111%.
That's what NASA is aiming for is 111% of the rated power,
which is quite a boost over the Shuttle era.
(rocket engines blasting)
In 2015 NASA begins testing
all 16 RS-25 engines at the Stennis Space Center.
It's a risky business pushing the engines to their limits
and preparing them for their ultimate mission.
(dramatic music)
So, you know, in terms of increasing the thrust level
of the RS-25 engine,
we're increasing the mass that we're flowing,
but we also increase the pressures that we see.
(rocket engines blasting)
If you start increasing pressures,
then you also have higher temperatures.
The turbo pumps have to be moving
at faster rotational speeds.
And you can imagine all of those things stress the material
more and more.
(rocket engines blasting)
So it is that fine balance that dance, if you will,
any change that you make affects not only the rocket engine,
but it could affect the vehicle as a whole.
(rocket engine blasting)
For this vehicle, you know,
it makes sense to make these engines expendable.
The Space Shuttle main engine,
or now the RS-25 was designed to be reusable.
The Space Shuttle was that, it was a reusable vehicle:
it went to low Earth orbit, it came back.
The mission for SLS is different,
we're going to the moon and beyond.
So when we get to main engine cutoff,
you're well out of the atmosphere,
so there's really no way to bring those engines back.
So you no longer have to design your engine
for an extended life.
And now that you have that shorter lifespan,
then you could push your components to higher pressures,
higher temperatures that may degrade its life.
But since we're no longer we're reusing it,
we're able to push those boundaries even farther.
Those are the trades you have to make.
We could not afford to carry the additional weight
and complexity associated with reusability.
But it hurts to throw away RS-25 engines.
(upbeat music)
I dunno how do you say it?
It's a little bit disappointing,
but we're going to the moon.
I mean, if you're gonna be used for the last time
in an expendable vehicle going to the moon,
that's pretty cool.
(deep pondering music)
We wanna use those engines
because no one's ever turned down
high thrust and high fuel economy.
Nobody's ever said, "Oh, I don't want those things
"on a rocket."
And that drives this requirement
of having these cryogenic propellants.
Hydrogen is the most efficient
known rocket propellant,
but it has a very low density.
Storing it and the oxygen needed to burn it,
even in liquid form requires huge tanks
and very low temperatures.
Any leakage creates a risk of catastrophic explosion.
When you liquefy them you can carry a lot more
in a smaller space, but if they get too warm
they flash to gas immediately, and then you're in trouble.
It's just not a normal part of engineering
to do cryogenic engineering.
We don't normally, in our everyday life, do things
that are at 40 degrees above absolute zero.
The hydrogen is so cold that it will actually freeze
the air around it in a duct, for instance.
So we have to make sure that we've got the proper insulation
on the ducting, not just on our engines,
but throughout the system.
Cryogenic temperatures can wreak havoc on components.
Large metal structures, valves, when you hit them
with cryogenic oxygen or hydrogen they change,
they move, they shrink.
The tank itself wants to expand with pressure,
it wants to shrink with the cryogenic,
and so all of that goes into designing hardware
for the SLS program.
(upbeat music)
The tanks need to stand up
to more than just changes in temperature,
they also need to withstand
the 8.8 million pounds of thrust at launch.
It's one thing to know that you have a strong structure,
it's another thing to take such a massive structure
and test it.
You don't build a scale model, you build a piece of hardware
that's like flight.
You know, the desire is to build it as if it could be
just interchanged with a piece of flight hardware.
We're looking at simulating the different loads
that it would undergo during flight.
You want to know that as you designed it
it will be able to carry out all of the different loads
and still maintain its structural integrity.
(pondering music)
It said in NASA
that they work for a 1.4 factor of safety,
meaning that something, a rocket should be able to tolerate
a load about one and a half higher
than what they think is possible.
For factors of safety as high as 11 for elevator cables,
airplanes factor of 2, 2 1/5,
so you could say of all the devices that mankind has made
rockets have about the narrowest factor of safety
because you need to have everything kind of running
right on the ragged edge.
If you don't, it won't get off the ground.
Confirming the design is neither too strong
nor too weak means testing it to destruction
in a giant rig to simulate the load in flight.
It needs to break exactly as predicted.
It was a pneumatic test.
We're pushing down on this tank
while we have pressure on it.
(light anticipatory music)
You hold your breath.
(light anticipatory music)
The first thing that we heard was an audible noise.
(engines exploding)
Did what we thought it would do it buckled.
And we actually clapped.
The models work really well, I was ready to call it a day.
You know, we'd tested the tank
that's when it breaks in flight.
But the tank held one last surprise.
(tank exploding)
We had high speed video of this metal
that's more than a half inch thick flopping in the breeze,
like a feather.
(steam sizzling)
After spending so much time welding
all of the tanks together in such a precise manner,
actually seeing it break apart can kind of cause your heart
to break, to be honest.
But it's very important data that we need
in order to understand the true capability
of the structural test article.
(light upbeat music)
The oxygen tank we tested was very similar.
We wanted to test that oxygen tank
at reasonably high pressure.
And to do that pneumatically would produced so much energy
that it would hurt the test stand and be a danger to folks,
and so we filled it full of water.
(pondering music)
I liked those test to failures.
The reason by the way we test to failure is to see
how much margin we have.
And it turned out in that hydrogen tank,
we have tremendous margin.
(dramatic music)
The core stage has aced its structural tests.
Now all the segments must be joined together
with its four RS-25 engines.
But despite the engine's awesome power,
not even pushing them past their design limit
will create enough thrust to get SLS off the planet.
(dramatic music)
My most efficient fuel, it turns out is hydrogen,
it gives me very high exhaust velocities.
And now that part of my rocket equation is satisfied,
it loves hydrogen.
But hydrogen is such a low density that now I've got to have
this huge tank to hold it.
And guess what?
My dry weight has gone up.
(upbeat music)
I need Solid Rocket Boosters to help get that big tank
off the ground.
(upbeat music)
The current booster is a derivation
from the Space Shuttle and it does look on the outside,
very similar to the Space Shuttle Booster,
but it is 25% longer, has 25% more fuel to provide
that much more thrust.
Each booster is built from five segments
filled with a solid epoxy propellant.
Once stuck together the segments stand 17 stories tall
and create more trust than 14 jumbo jets.
I like to think of the boosters is an afterburner
on a fighter jet.
When you have a heavy rocket lifting off of the launch pad,
over 90% of that is fuel.
And so you have to have an immense amount of thrust
to get that off the ground.
(rocket engines blasting)
SLS generates over 8 million pounds of thrust
and the Solid Rocket Boosters
generate about 5 million pounds of that by itself.
(rocket engines blasting)
So the boosters contribute the majority
of the thrust capability for SLS.
When I flew Space Shuttles, I could feel that
in the crew module as this incredible push.
(dramatic music) (rocket engines blasting)
Even though its efficiency is not as good as hydrogen,
it burns propellant with very high thrust
and it loses its weight very rapidly,
and so I can accelerate the vehicle coming off of the pad.
(rocket engines blasting) (dramatic music)
You want to dump weight as fast as you can.
And so what we do is when we empty a stage of fuel,
it's no good to us anymore, it's dry weight.
We release it and let it drop into the ocean.
(rocket engines blasting)
Five, four, three, two, one, fire.
Work on converting the Solid Rocket Boosters
for SLS began back in 2013,
with testing carried out in Promontory, Utah.
You've got 10 seconds.
Once we lift off, we're now confronted with
a lot of challenges that we have to have designed properly.
Chief has 20 seconds.
The temperature that the Solid Rocket fuels burn at
is in excess of 5,000, pushing 6,000 degrees.
And what we do is we ignite it from the top
and we let it burn out the bottom in a nozzle.
(fire blasting)
And you have this tube of propellant that joins up
with a steel casing.
You've got 30 seconds.
You don't just put the propellant next to the steel,
that would melt it.
So there has to be an insulating rubber layer
that protects the steel from that intense flame.
In the Shuttle system we had an asbestos fiber
that was effective, but not as effective
as these new materials.
That rubber insulation, as it is exposed to heat
actually turns to a charred material that further protects
the case from any exposure to the heat.
(rocket engines blasting)
NASA worries about voids between the propellant
and that rubber liner.
That could cause an extra point of heat
as that propellant burns down.
The consequences of that could be improper burning,
could be early burn back through the insulation,
which is not something you wanna deal with
when you're talking about the massive forces
inside a rocket motor.
(dramatic music)
Even the tiniest void could cause
a catastrophic failure at lunch.
We eventually got to processes that could eliminate
those voids and it took an immense amount of engineering
to do that.
The Solid Rocket Boosters will operate
for just 126 seconds at flight.
And within that the first minute is crucial.
You've got 40 seconds.
30 to 50 seconds after liftoff,
you start to approach this transonic regime
where shock waves form.
(dramatic music) (rocket engines blasting)
Max-Q, max dynamic pressure.
There's nobody in this industry
that doesn't think about Max-Q.
(rocket engines blasting)
And if you didn't throttle back,
you could do damage to the structure.
(dramatic music)
The boosters use a clever trick to throttle back
and then build trust again,
and it's baked into the design.
We put fins into that propellant,
so as you look down you actually see a star shape pattern,
and all of that pattern is exposed propellant.
And it turns out that the rate at which the propellant burns
is proportional to how much propellant is exposed.
(rocket engines blasting)
And we time that such that as the rocket reaches
this point of maximum dynamic pressure,
we're actually throttling the Solid Rocket Booster
to where the thrust decreases
till we break through that sound barrier,
we push it back again.
(rocket engines blasting)
You've got 120 seconds.
(rocket engines blasting)
Activate head and CO2.
(train horn blasting)
Because the booster is so large
we actually ship it in separate segments by train
from the manufacturing facility in Utah
to the launch site at Cape Kennedy,
and at the Kennedy Space Center.
(light dramatic music)
The Vehicle Assembly Building or VAB as we refer to it,
it's a single-story building, but it's huge, 525 feet tall.
We could build four rockets at a time if we really wanted.
(dramatic music)
The arrival of the Solid Rocket Boosters
sets off an irreversible countdown to lunch.
Once they are assembled they must be used
within 12 months before there are damaged
by their own weight.
There is a timeframe here that we've got to march to,
we've got to steadily make progress, we have a plan.
With time critical,
nothing has been left to chance.
The entire procedure has been planned and rehearsed
for every part of SLS.
(dramatic music)
I don't care how much experience you have,
this rocket is new.
So we train our folks all the time.
Brought a mock-up of the entire 212-foot long
rocket stage pathfinder, we called it,
and we let our people rotate it, handle it,
lift it and practice with it.
(dramatic music)
One of the biggest things that we had to consider,
in the design of the SLS was its attachment to the ground.
NASA began essential upgrades
to the Kennedy Space Center's facilities back in 2013.
For SLS it has revolutionized one iconic idea
from the Saturn V program, Launch Umbilical Tower.
(dramatic music)
This is a massive, massive structure
that when you're at the top of it
you're roughly 400 feet off the ground.
The structure was built for the Constellation program,
but then, that's about as far as we got,
because then the program was canceled.
It saved us money to go ahead and say,
"Okay, let's transform this mobile launcher
"from Constellation over here to SLS."
Now, sounds straightforward, right.
But, honestly, when you look at SLS,
the weight is tremendously increased,
the power of the rocket is tremendously increased.
So we had to basically reinforce the entire structure.
The umbilicals provide, you know, the food if you will,
the carrying and feeding to the rocket,
the fuel, the gasses, the cooling, the communications,
the data all feed through these arms that are attached
to the giant tower on the mobile launcher.
When we fire the SRBs, the Solid Rocket Boosters,
we're basically moving within a quarter of a second.
So literally within a blink of an eye,
(rocket engines blasting)
the mobile launcher platform has to release
all of those umbilicals and get back out of the way
of the vehicle as the vehicle rises off the pad.
(dramatic music)
She throw us a curve ball every day.
It was a tough process.
I spent, you know, three and a half years out there,
basically living in a trailer.
But when you're working on something like that,
you realize it's unique, it's one.
You know what you're doing with it, right
I'm gonna launch the world's most powerful rocket.
So all of that helps drive you.
The tower sits on top of a platform
over 21,000 feet square.
Together they form the mobile launcher.
The mobile launcher or ML as we always refer to it
is, essentially, the cradle, it's kind of the central point
of assembling and testing the rocket.
(dramatic music)
The entire rocket will be built on top
of the mobile launcher, and then the mobile launcher
is transferred out to the pad using the Crawler-transporter.
We do have a season for hurricanes, that can be tough.
If we were out at the pad,
when a hurricane were to come along,
we would roll back to the VAB and button the rocket up
inside there and ride it out.
(pondering music)
(anticipatory music)
Stacking the Solid Rocket Boosters
is progressing well.
Now the pressure is on to get the core stage
to the vehicle assembly building.
(anticipatory music)
But first the entire stage must be lifted into a stand
at the Stennis Space Center for a crucial hot fire test.
(anticipatory music)
The weight of that column of liquid pushing down
on the engines at the bottom creates
a different operating condition when the engines start.
(anticipatory music)
The problem we could have had with the engine
was a structural failure.
So we had to go prove on the test stand
that the engine would start and run
at liquid oxygen pressures that high.
(pondering music)
It is primarily a test of the propulsion systems,
and so there's a lot of focus on my hardware,
which is the steering system for the rocket.
Space Launch System will be steered
using a technique known as gimballing.
It requires precise individual adjustments
to the direction of the four RS-25 engines.
You're trying to make adjustments of less than a degree
sometimes in those nozzles to change the trajectory
just slightly on a vehicle that is going
thousands of miles per hour through the atmosphere.
And they have to work perfectly every single time
because there is no room for error in steering the rocket.
We designed these parts
and they're supposed to do a certain thing,
but you never know until you actually test.
The ultimate test is the hot fire test,
and that is where all four engines are firing
for a simulated flight.
The only difference is that the core stage
is bolted into a test stand.
Everything is there to mimic the launch
as just the core stage alone.
So you actually have to fool the rocket into thinking
there's boosters there.
Firing a Solid Rocket Booster in that kind of position
we would have melted the test stand down.
(pondering music)
We need to test all the engines for at least four minutes
if not eight minutes.
Eight minutes is a full flight.
(pondering music)
This is the last major hurdle
in making its way towards the launch pad.
It's a kind of test, you know, comes along once in a career,
once in a lifetime.
I'm in the test control center
with the steel blast doors closed.
10, 9, 8, 7, (rocket engines blasting)
and you see the steam and the fire coming out of this hole.
(rocket engines blasting)
And we're (indistinct), engine start.
When those engines start up,
even though you're locked inside a bunker,
you can still feel the power of four engines running
at the same time.
(rocket engines blasting)
All right less 25 seconds.
(rocket engines blasting)
PDRA we did get an MCF on engine four.
Roger that, but we're still running.
We've still got four-
There's a couple of things going on
that you didn't exactly predict,
but actually it didn't affect our rocket at all, you know.
(dramatic music) (rocket engines blasting)
Things were going well.
We were just starting the first gimbal test.
(rocket engines blasting)
You see these engines and they look like they're dancing.
(rocket engines blasting)
We got 62 seconds into test
and we shut down.
(indistinct)
Gotcha.
(indistinct) safety violation (indistinct).
There was an announcement, major component malfunction.
(rocket engines blasting)
And in that moment, you kind of feel the light shift
in your direction a little bit.
What did I miss?
What did I not see?
Certainly all of that is going through your mind.
Rockets operate on such a very narrow margin
that when something is called a major component malfunction,
you sit up and take notice.
(indistinct) personnel.
Shut down looks like
let's all go to page 656, page 656, please.
When something like that occurs and you shut down,
the first thing you're doing is just securing the hardware.
You know, we've got flight hardware sitting on the pad
and it still has cryogenics in it.
The best way to drain the tank is to burn for eight minutes
and then I don't have those cryogenics in it,
but I've got cryogenics that's really, really cold,
and then I've got an engine that's really, really hot,
and I wanna make sure all of those systems are safe.
All personnel it's gonna be
post hot-fire shut down securing operations
in page 656.
At this point, the core stage is a golden egg for NASA.
Meaning there is nothing else on the shelf
that can replace it.
If something happened that broke the egg,
that could be the end of mission event.
AR1 (indistinct) please verify
we have a safe engine shutdown.
We are in post shutdown,
standby, engine 1 through 4.
It took a good hour to figure out what went wrong.
For this first test NASA has set
very tight limits to avoid damaging the flight hardware.
One limit has been reached.
But after carefully reviewing all the gathered data
engineers determined that it can be safely relaxed
ahead of a new test.
You know, people misunderstand tests,
they're not stunts, they're not media events,
what they are is they're answers to questions
that you had.
You're looking at the historic
B Test Complex at NASA's-
So for the second hot fire,
we recognized that both the media,
and really the eyes within NASA and the program
were watching this core stage test.
(rocket engines blasting)
And we get to that first gimballing,
it was the longest that I had ever held my breath.
(rocket engines blasting)
The only way I can explain that core stage test
is the whole atmosphere was shaking like an earthquake.
(rocket engines blasting)
The thought goes through my mind still,
how does that thing stay together?
(rocket engines blasting)
We were entering unchartered waters, if you will,
to get to the end of the test and to run
a full eight minutes and deplete
both of the propellant tanks.
(dramatic music)
Being able to see Space Launch System come to life,
do exactly what it was supposed to do and to perform
and be able to deplete out the fuel system,
that's a dream come true
for any rocket propulsion engineer out there.
(rocket engines blasting) (dramatic music)
It was extraordinary to accomplish.
Chanel 16.
There was a lot of emotion in the test control room.
There was joy, there was high fives and hugs
and maybe a few tears that were shed.
It was absolutely a sigh of relief.
I saw these components as sheets of paper,
and I actually saw them being built.
Then I saw them all come together and work as a single unit.
These are my babies, right.
So when you go to a soccer game or football game
for your child and they make a goal
or they catch a ball, they hit a home run,
you're gonna scream, right, "Yay. Good job."
And so for me, I'm screaming for
"Yay (indistinct), do your job.
"Yay, prevalve, yay, feed line." (laughs)
Safe and shutdown.
(dramatic music)
All personnel that fixes the page 656-
We all took a few hours to celebrate that
and then we were onto the next task,
which was getting the stage loaded onto a barge
and shipped to the Kennedy Space Center.
(dramatic music)
When the core stage arrived by barge,
it did create a buzz, you know,
that was a big day for us, right,
because that was the very last piece
of the puzzle we needed.
(dramatic music)
All the parts of the rocket are now here
at Kennedy Space Center.
(dramatic music)
Now the next big step is we'll lift it and go up and over
and into the High Bay 3
and actually attach it to the boosters.
(dramatic music)
So now you have two boosters and a core stage.
Then we just continue stacking.
You start at the bottom and you just keep building blocks,
you know, you just stack them and you keep going up.
(dramatic music)
(upbeat music)
Among the last pieces to be stacked
will be the crew and service vehicles.
Our crew vehicle is the Orion Spacecraft.
(light upbeat music)
That Orion Capsule is a lot more than a capsule
that goes to low-Earth orbit,
it goes faster, has a stronger heat shield,
it can handle the environment of deep space
like the high energy neutrons much better.
(light upbeat music)
Space Launch Systems first uncrewed mission,
Artemis 1 would be a momentous flight for the rocket,
but more importantly a critical validation
of the Orion vehicle's safety.
The main thing they want is a successful
loop around the moon, come back and then test that re-entry.
And that reentry should be capable of bringing them back
from lunar orbit at about 25,000 miles an hour.
So it'll be a high performance reentry shield
that's for sure.
(pondering music)
That was one of our prime objectives of developing SLS.
(pondering music)
And in Artemis we will be carrying Orion and the crew
to the moon.
The Artemis project is something that encompasses,
you know, nearly everything we're doing at NASA right now.
In my team, we do a lot of the propulsion testing
for the technologies that Artemis is going to rely on
to get back to the moon and to go beyond.
(pondering music)
I mean, sometimes it can be overwhelming
when you think about everything in the daisy chain
that has to go right to be successful.
But you know, if it was easy,
everybody would be doing it, right.
It's not meant to just, you know, take a return visit
back to the moon.
We will be able to create a presence on the moon,
a lunar outpost that we'll be able to facilitate
multiple visits to the moon and then venture
onto deep space destinations, including Mars.
(dramatic music)
We know what's at stake,
not just all the work that's been put forth for everyone,
it's also the lives of astronauts.
(dramatic music)
We need to make sure that we're a program
that can sustain itself, that meets that mission
to take us all the way to Mars.
(dramatic music)
For me, these hard missions, these missions that we do
because they are hard, they measure the very best of us.
(dramatic music)
They combine our efforts across nations
and across people groups.
(futuristic music)
They make us better.
(dramatic music)
(light outro music)