NASA’s ‘Mega Moon Rocket’ has successfully completed its maiden flight and is ready for the Artemis II crewed launch

The massive Space Launch System has passed its first test with flying colors, NASA’s preliminary analysis concludes, and the Orion rocket and capsule are ready for their next mission: Artemis II, which will carry a crew into lunar orbit.

After numerous delays and huge cost overruns, some feared the SLS (nicknamed the “Mega Moon Rocket”) would never take off. But the launch in November went (for the most part) without a hitch, as did the 25-day mission undertaken by an uncrewed Orion capsule.

While his success was evident, it was not an all-or-nothing case. Tons of data had to be analyzed by NASA teams to ensure that Artemis I did not succeed despite serious problems. Fortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case: although the teams are still working on the terabytes of raw data, the agency has declared the mission good enough to approve its sequel.

“Based on the evaluation conducted shortly after launch, preliminary post-flight data indicates that all SLS systems performed exceptionally and the designs are ready to support crewed flight on Artemis II. “, NASA wrote in a news article.

Underscoring this point, SLS Program Director John Honeycutt is quoted as follows:

The correlation between actual flight performance and predicted performance for Artemis I was excellent. There’s engineering and an art to successfully building and launching a rocket, and analysis of the SLS rocket’s maiden flight positions NASA and its partners well to propel the Artemis II missions and beyond. of the.

Major pressures, temperatures and other values ​​were all within 2% of forecast. No doubt the team is working to reduce this delta even now.

The Artemis II crewed mission was obviously entirely dependent on the success of Artemis I, and this is the clearest indication since launch that the SLS and Orion are quantifiably good enough. It’s a big step to say, “Yeah, we’re moving forward with sending astronauts on this thing,” but of course there’s still a lot of work to do before that happens. The Artemis I timeline didn’t exactly go to plan, but having verified that the rocket is performing as expected may help speed up the next part of NASA’s grand plan to return to the moon.