The four RS-25 engines of the SLS core stage fire up at the start of the Green Run static-fire test January 16 at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. (credit: J. Foust)
Green Run, yellow light
Monday, January 18, 2021
For a decade, one of the tentpoles of NASA’s human space exploration program has been the Space Launch System, even as what was inside the tent changed: supporting the Asteroid Redirect Mission, returning humans to the Moon in the late 2020s, and now a human return to the Moon as early as 2024. But also for that decade, the SLS has yet to fly, its first launch slipping by several years. (Orion, the other tentpole of that program, is even older, dating back to the Constellation program of the latter half of the ’00s, but at least it has flown once, on a brief orbital test flight in late 2014.)
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An exhaust plume erupts from the B-2 test stand during a test-firing of the Space Launch System core stage Jan. 16. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz
NASA officials said Tuesday the weekend test-firing of the Space Launch System moon rocket’s core stage was cut short by an out-of-limits parameter in a hydraulic system for gimbaling, or vectoring, one of its engines.