NASA has just tested its next-generation, RS-25 super-engine that promises to take humans to Mars. Designed for the agency’s 70-ton Space Launch System rocket, it will be fitted onto the Orion spacecraft.
More than 1,200 onlookers watched as the ground rumbled and steam poured out of the engine into the already humid Mississippi air at Stennis Space Center for 535 seconds. Thursday’s successful test marked the sixth and next to last test firing of the RS-25 engine.
RS-25 is one of four engines that will power NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and carry the Orion crew capsule into deep space, eventually to Mars.
The engine, RS-25 engineer Kathryn Crowe calls “the Ferrari of rocket engines” is designed to be highly efficient, but also affordable, because it will not be recoverable after launch.
RS-25 produces 512,000 pounds of thrust, that’s more than 12 million horsepower and makes a modern jet engine look like a wind-up toy, writes Martin Burkey with NASA’s Space Launch System team.
The RS-25 engine design has actually been around since the start of the Space Shuttle Program, but has undergone five upgrades since the 1970s improving the design and performance.
NASA is on schedule to finish testing the engines later this year.
