Secrets of the Universe (2022–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - SLS: NASA's Mega Rocket - full transcript

Secrets of the Universe -
SLS NASAs Mega Rocket

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.

To me, NASA's role was always to go deep into space.

Thank you.

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.

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.

The magnitude, both in power and in size.

Not just heavy lift, but super heavy lift.

It's NASA, most powerful rocket ever,

a machine built to allow humanity

to explore the moon and beyond.

This is the story of the mighty Space Launch System, or SLS.

With a Space Launch System, the stars are our destination.

But we haven't developed anything like SLS

in, literally, 40 years.

And so we're having to start from scratch on,

"Hey, how do we get to the moon?

"What do we need?"

The questions that arise are,

who has the expertise even to do the same thing,

but also to do it better or differently?

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

It sounds really simple,

but there was much more complexity to doing that

than first meets the eye.

With a new team in place

engineering for SLS is underway,

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.

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.

One of the complexities of SLS is due to its extreme size,

the larger the structure, the lower its natural frequencies.

When you go through the transonic region,

shocks are trying to form on the side of the vehicle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With SLS, NASA is pushing at the limits

of what is possible because there's a fundamental reality

that governs all rockets.

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.

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.

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.

And there is a limit to how big you can make something.

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.

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.

It's one of the most important segments of the core stage

for the Space Launch System,

because it attaches the RS-25 engines.

16 Shuttle main engines were leftover

after the Shuttle program ended in 2011 called RS-25s.

They already have a proven track record.

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.

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.

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%.

Vehicle guys always want more power.

Going to the SLS,

the first flight will be at 109, not 100%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We wanna use those engines

because no one's ever turned down

high thrust and high fuel economy.

Nobody's ever said, "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.

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.

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.

You hold your breath.

The first thing that we heard was an audible noise.

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.

We had high speed video of this metal

that's more than a half inch thick flopping in the breeze,

like a feather.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I need Solid Rocket Boosters to help get that big tank

off the ground.

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.

SLS generates over 8 million pounds of thrust

and the Solid Rocket Boosters

generate about 5 million pounds of that by itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Max-Q, max dynamic pressure.

There's nobody in this industry

that doesn't think about Max-Q.

And if you didn't throttle back,

you could do damage to the structure.

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.

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.

You've got 120 seconds.

Activate head and CO2.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

Stacking the Solid Rocket Boosters

is progressing well.

Now the pressure is on to get the core stage

to the vehicle assembly building.

But first the entire stage must be lifted into a stand

at the Stennis Space Center for a crucial hot fire test.

The weight of that column of liquid pushing down

on the engines at the bottom creates

a different operating condition when the engines start.

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.

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.

We need to test all the engines for at least four minutes

if not eight minutes.

Eight minutes is a full flight.

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,

and you see the steam and the fire coming out of this hole.

And we're , 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.

All right less 25 seconds.

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.

Things were going well.

We were just starting the first gimbal test.

You see these engines and they look like they're dancing.

We got 62 seconds into test

and we shut down.

Gotcha.

safety violation.

There was an announcement, major component malfunction.

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.

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 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.

And we get to that first gimballing,

it was the longest that I had ever held my breath.

The only way I can explain that core stage test

is the whole atmosphere was shaking like an earthquake.

The thought goes through my mind still,

how does that thing stay together?

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.

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.

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 , do your job.

"Yay, prevalve, yay, feed line."

Safe and shutdown.

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.

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.

All the parts of the rocket are now here

at Kennedy Space Center.

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.

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.

Among the last pieces to be stacked

will be the crew and service vehicles.

Our crew vehicle is the Orion Spacecraft.

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.

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.

That was one of our prime objectives of developing SLS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me, these hard missions, these missions that we do

because they are hard, they measure the very best of us.

They combine our efforts across nations

and across people groups.

They make us better.