With the Orion capsule attached to its tip, the SLS rocket rises 98 meters high, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, but a little less than the 110 meters of the Saturn V rocket that sent Man on the Moon during the Apollo missions.
SLS will, however, produce 39.1 meganewtons of thrust, 15% more than Saturn V, making it the most powerful rocket in the world today. “It is a symbol of our country“, declared this week in front of the press Tom Whitmeyer, a senior NASA official. A symbol however accompanied by a bill of 4.1 billion dollars per launch for the first four Artemis missions to the Moon, underlined the US Space Agency Inspector General Paul Martin before Congress this month.
Once the launch pad is reached, engineers will have approximately two weeks to conduct a battery of tests before a pre-launch dress rehearsal. On April 3, the SLS team will load more than three million liters of cryogenic fuel into the rocket and repeat each stage of the countdown until the last 10 seconds, without firing the engines. The rocket will then be drained of fuel to demonstrate a safe aborted launch.