A power lifting record more than fifty years old is soon to be broken. No, I’m not talking about barbells and grunting strong men. The mighty Saturn V is about to be dethroned as the world’s most powerful rocket ever successfully flown. If all goes according to schedule, NASA’s long delayed Space Launch System (SLS) will launch an unmanned Orion capsule on a trip to the moon and back on Monday, August 29th at 8:33 am EDT.
A Saturn V lifted off from Florida thirteen times, ten times with a crew aboard. There were two uncrewed test flights before Apollo 8 was sent on its historic journey into lunar orbit in December 1968, and the Skylab space station was sent into Earth orbit to be joined later by American astronauts.
There are several ways to rate the power of a rocket, but perhaps the simplest is its thrust as it launches. Thrust is the force that propels the rocket upward; the easiest units (at least for non-metric Americans) are pounds. The Saturn V generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust as it left the Florida sands.
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The SLS may look familiar if you remember the Space Shuttle era. There are the familiar solid rocket side boosters and the big orange fuel tank between them. Indeed, much of the SLS technology is recycled from the Shuttle. The solid rocket boosters are stretched versions of those used for the Shuttle, and the four engines of the core stage are all ones that have previously flown on Shuttle missions. The core stage holds the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.
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At liftoff the SLS will generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust. This is NASA’s new moon rocket, the one it proposes to use to send humans back to the moon and later on the first steps of a trip to Mars. Maybe. So much of the future of human space exploration is uncertain. The SLS is a throwback to the days of throwaway boosters. None of it is reusable, and of course that makes it more expensive. It is the product of components manufactured in multiple congressional districts, all of whose representatives made sure the program stayed alive through multiple budget cycles and escalating costs.
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Its first mission, Artemis I (Artemis is the mythical sister of Apollo) will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit. It will spend from three to six weeks in space before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Artemis II is planned as a four-person lunar flyby, and Artemis III as a four-person lunar orbit with a 2-person lunar landing.
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The launch of such a massive rocket should be quite a sight!
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