A towering mobile platform for the agency’s Space Launch System arrived at launch pad 39B Friday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a sequence of water and propellant flow tests, swing arm checkouts and other rehearsals that should conclude with managers declaring the spaceport’s ground systems ready to support the first SLS launch campaign by the end of the year.
The Mobile Launcher is a moving platform that will transfer the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad. The $1 billion tower is one of the tallest structures in the Cape Canaveral area, and NASA originally built it for the Ares 1 rocket, a single-booster launcher that was cancelled in 2010 before it ever flew on an orbital mission.
The rollout of the Mobile Launcher to pad 39B this week caps nine months of electrical and mechanical testing inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. After checking the platform and tower’s compatibility with the VAB, where the Space Launch System will be stacked, engineers now want to ensure it will work at the launch pad.
“It’s that next big step right before the final exam, before we’re done,” said Cliff Lanham, NASA’s senior project manager for the Mobile Launcher. “So we’re all very excited. I know our operations group is ready to get ahold of it, so they can operating it with the rocket. Everybody’s pumped about this.”
But exactly when NASA can finally put the Mobile Launcher to use is hard to predict, officials said Thursday. Difficulties with the assembly of the Space Launch System’s Boeing-built core stage in Louisiana have put in doubt a first launch of the new rocket in 2020, three years later than originally envisioned.
NASA is developing the Space Launch System to send astronauts on voyages to the moon — with a goal of a human landing there within five years — by way of a mini-space station the space agency plans to assemble in a high lunar orbit.
The space agency says the first SLS launch, without a crew on-board, could still happen before the end of 2020, but any technical problems discovered in several critical upcoming ground tests could delay the launch as late as June 2021, according to a Government Accountability Office report released earlier this month.
NASA officials said the rollout of the Mobile Launcher to pad 39B should be the last time the mammoth structure makes the trip to the launch pad before ground crews stack the Space Launch System on the platform in preparation for the first flight.
The SLS core stage will be powered by four RS-25 main engines, two solid rocket boosters and an RL10 upper stage engine. At liftoff, the rocket will generate up to 8.8 million pounds of thrust.
The first SLS launch, designated Artemis 1, will send an unpiloted Orion crew capsule on a shakedown cruise to the moon and back. The Orion spacecraft and its service module will swing as close as 62 miles (100 kilometers) from the lunar surface, then loop into a more distant orbit around 40,000 miles (70,000 kilometers) from the moon before returning to Earth.
The second SLS/Orion flight, in 2022 or 2023, will carry astronauts on a looping trajectory around the moon and back to Earth, followed by the Artemis 3 mission in 2024, which could attempt the first landing on the moon by astronauts since 1972.
One of NASA’s Apollo-era diesel-powered crawler-transporters carried the 10.5-million-pound Mobile Launcher from the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building to pad 39B. Both facilities at the Florida spaceport were built in the 1960s for the Apollo moon program, and later modified for the space shuttle and the Space Launch System.
The crawler crew divided the 4.2-mile (6.8-kilometer) journey over two days, beginning around 12 a.m. EDT (0400 GMT) Thursday with rollout from High Bay 3 in the Vehicle Assembly Building, where the tower has resided since last September. The Mobile Launcher trekked down the rock-covered crawlerway at a top speed of 0.8 mph — about 1.3 kilometers per hour, or 70 feet per minute — and arrived at the gate to pad 39B by late morning Thursday.
The Mobile Launcher finished the trip up the ramp to pad 39B on Friday morning. A laser alignment system helped the crawler crew guide the Mobile Launcher to the correct position, then lower it over six pedestals at the launch pad.
NASA plans to keep the Mobile Launcher at pad 39B until around the end of September. During the three-month campaign, engineers will run a series of tests, including swing arm retractions to mimic their function during a launch countdown, and pumping cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants through the structure’s plumbing for the first time.
“What we’ll do is we’ll hook all our systems to the pad systems, and we’ll test to make sure the Mobile Launcher and the pad work together properly,” Lanham said. “We’ll be testing, for instance, water flows, sound suppression, IOP (Ignition Overpressure) systems. We’ll be doing cryo flows as well out there.
“We will be doing the crew access arm swings because in the VAB we can’t fully test the swings of the arm, so we’ll be testing those out there. We’ll also be doing some end-to-end testing on the electrical systems. We’ll make sure we can command from the LCC (Launch Control Center) all the way out to the pad,” Lanham said. “We do have a simultaneous arm swing planned, where we’ll swing three of the arms together and make sure the hydraulic system can handle that.”
Unlike the moving launch tables used by the space shuttle, the SLS mobile launcher includes a gigantic skyscraper-like structure on the platform itself. The 380-foot-tall (115-meter) Mobile Launcher features a metal tower atop a two-story base with six swing arms that will retract away from the rocket before launch.
In the shuttle era, pads 39A and 39B had fixed umbilical towers to provide astronauts, ground crews and swing arms access to the vehicle. The Apollo program’s Saturn 5 moon rocket used a similar pad setup as the SLS, but the Saturn 5’s mobile tower had nine swing arms.
The SLS tower and platform contain nearly 1,000 pieces of ground support equipment, routing power, data, water, propellants, air conditioning and other commodities to the launch vehicle and Orion crew capsule.
Once engineers finish the the tests at the launch pad this summer, the Mobile Launcher will return to High Bay 3 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building for a few final checkouts, including a demonstration in which cranes will stack dummy segments of an SLS booster on the platform for the first time.
“This is a big day for us,” said Darrell Foster, exploration ground systems integration manager at KSC. “From my perspective, this is our launch day … From a hardware development standpoint, this is what we live for, these big milestones, and putting the pieces together. It’s like a puzzle.”
At launch pad 39B, workers have installed new heat-resistant bricks inside the flame trench, and put in a new flame director to shunt exhaust from the SLS main engines and solid rocket boosters toward the north at liftoff. NASA added new work platforms inside the VAB high bay to allow workers to reach the SLS during stacking and test operations.
NASA officials said the Mobile Launcher, along with newly-installed hardware at pad 39B and inside the VAB, should be ready to start the first SLS launch campaign by the end of the year.
NASA awards contract to build second SLS launch tower
While workers at Kennedy prepared for rollout of the SLS launch platform this week, NASA announced Tuesday that Bechtel National Inc., a Virginia company, will build a second Mobile Launcher to accommodate an upgraded, taller version of the Space Launch System.
Under a $383 million contract, Bechtel National will design, build, test and commission the second Mobile Launcher over a 44-month period beginning July 1. Officials expect the new launch tower, which will be built just outside the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC, to be ready by early 2023.
Congress appropriated funding for the second Mobile Launcher last year to fit a bigger version of the SLS named the Block 1B. The SLS Block 1B will have a wider second stage, with four engines instead of the single engine flying initial SLS missions.
Foster said NASA will give Bechtel National flexibility to redesign some parts of the Mobile Launcher as they begin work on the new structure. The swing arms will be built to print, and NASA will develop a new umbilical arm to feed propellants to the bigger SLS second stage, which is named the Exploration Upper Stage.
The SLS Block 1B could debut as soon as the Artemis 3 launch in 2024, allowing missions to the moon to carry heavier payloads. Meanwhile, NASA plans to rely on commercial rockets to launch modules for the Gateway, a mini-station around the moon that crews will use as a stopover and safe haven during lunar landing expeditions.
NASA spent $234 million building the original Mobile Launcher configured for the Ares 1 rocket, and the agency expects to have spent $753 million to modify the structure and outfit it for the Space Launch System, by the time of the Artemis 1 mission, according to reports from the Office of Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office, and NASA’s fiscal year 2020 budget request.
Agency officials chose to use the Ares 1 tower for the Space Launch System because they estimated it would be less expensive than modifying a space shuttle launch platform, or building a brand new structure.
While the second Mobile Launcher will be larger than the first, NASA officials expect it to be cheaper.
“We have tons of lessons learned from this one,” Foster said. “ML-1 wasn’t originally designed for SLS, so we had to do a lot of structural modifications, which added weight.
“We had to basically weld pieces on top of pieces to stiffen them more. With ML-2, we won’t have to do that. We know our loads going in, we know what it’s being designed for … We’re hoping, even though it’s going to be a little bit taller, we’re hoping it’ll be lighter.”
