STORY – Its development is a direct consequence of the accident of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003
«Pour send men to the moon, it’s not complicated, you need a very powerful rocket”summarizes Christophe Bonnal, launcher specialist at Cnes. “The reason is simple. The Moon is much further away than the low orbit where the International Space Station is located. We must extract ourselves from the gravitational well of the Earth and therefore provide more speed. And since the energy varies with the square of the speed, much more power is needed.
Sixty years later, the equation is the same for Artemis as for the Apollo program, and it is not very surprising that NASA’s new heavy rocket, SLS, is comparable in mass and size to the mythical Saturn V which had enabled Armstrong to set foot on the Moon. For the first flight around our natural satellite, the SLS rocket in its Block 1 version weighs 2,600 tons at takeoff, or the equivalent of 33 Airbus A 320s!
A new launcher
Before this inaugural mission scheduled for Monday, August 28, the development of SLS was long…
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