NASA took its mega moon rocket back to the shop for repairs.
What is it?
Pictured, the SLS rocket, topped with Orion spacecraftrolls into NASA’s massive Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday (February 25) just as the sun set on the Space Coast.
NASA decided to roll the SLS back to the VAB to handle a helium flow error. This problem was discovered shortly after a successful wet general test, a test in which the rocket is powered by propellant gas as it would be before an actual launch.
NASA had been looking at an early March launch window for Artemis 2, but the mission won’t start until April at the earliest. When it flies, the mission will send a crew of four around the moon and back in a 10-day journey.
Why is it amazing?
This image shows the staggering scale of the SLS, the VAB and the Tracked Transport Vehicle that hauls the rocket to and from the launch pad.
This version of the SLS is 322 feet (98 meters) tall. When an SLS rocket launched on the Artemis 1 mission On 16 November 2022, the world’s tallest and most powerful rocket was launched. SpaceX’s Spaceship now holds that record, although the SLS remains the smartest vehicle ever to reach Earth’s orbit.
To accommodate such a large vehicle, NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building has a height of 526 feet (160 m), and has the distinction of being the largest single-story building in the world. The massive structure allows engineers to access every part of a rocket as it is being stacked and developed before flight.
A 130-foot-wide (40 m) path known as the crawlerway extends from the VAB to NASA’s two launch pads at Launch Complex 39, from where Artemis 2 will launch. A special vehicle known as the conveyor belt (seen below the rocket in the image) slowly rolls rockets between the launch pads there and the VAB at a speed of 1 mph (1.6 km/h).
