14 DAY TRIAL // It's no news that NASA wants to one day land a crew on Mars. In last year's December, the US agency took the first step to seeing this dream come alive when it sent its Orion spacecraft to an altitude of 3,604.2 miles (5,800.3 kilometers).
As reported at that time, it's an Orion spacecraft like the one successfully launched on December 5, 2014, that NASA hopes will sometime in the not-too-distant future carry astronauts and cargo to Mars.
The thing is that, to have a spacecraft make it all the way to the Red Planet, you have to give it a pretty big push out of our planet's atmosphere and into deep space. To this end, the space agency wants to build an insanely powerful rocket.
Introducing NASA's proposed Space Launch System
In a statement, the US agency promises that this rocket it wants to put together for deep space missions will be the most powerful the world has ever seen.
“This new rocket will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever built. It is designed to be sustainable and evolve to carry crew and cargo on deep space missions, including an asteroid and ultimately to Mars,” the space agency writes.
The Space Launch System will be designed in such a way that it will perfectly connect to the Orion spacecraft. Check out the images accompanying this article to get a better idea of what it will look like.
NASA says that its maiden voyage will see the state-of-the-art rocket carry an Orion spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit. For this first flight, the space vehicle will be configured to have a lift capacity of 70 metric tons.
A few upgrades later, however, NASA's space vehicle should achieve an unprecedented lift capacity of 130 metric tons. Then, it will be ready for missions deep into our Solar System.
The bad news: the rocket is still in its design phase
We'd love to tell you that this super powerful rocket will very soon take to the skies, but the truth is that, these days, the space vehicle is still in its design phase. Then again, it looks like it won't be long until actual construction work begins.
Thus, it was this past Monday 11 that its critical design review kicked off at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. What this means is that a committee will review the plans to build the rocket and decide whether or not the project can and should be given the green light.
“The critical design review demonstrates that the SLS [Space Launch System] design meets all system requirements with acceptable risk, and accomplishes that within cost and schedule constraints,” the US space agency explains.
Furthermore, “It also proves that the rocket should continue with full-scale production, assembly, integration, and testing and that the program is ready to begin the next major review covering design certification.”
Prior to this critical design review that focuses on the rocket as a whole, each of the space vehicle's elements were reviewed independently and passed the test with flying colors.
