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The most powerful rocket in the world, SLS, took off Wednesday, November 16 for the first time from Florida, for a mission marking the great start of the American program to return to the Moon, Artemis.
NASA’s new moon rocket is quite simply the most powerful launch vehicle ever built, the biggest firecracker built by mankind, says Simon Rozé, RFI’s special correspondent in Florida. It was supposed to take off at 7:04 a.m. Paris time, there was a delay, forty minutes, even though everything had gone very well in the first hours of the countdown.
Fueling was going perfectly until a leak of liquid hydrogen broke out at a valve, NASA had no choice but to send a team, the ” red team “, on the launch pad, to make the repair directly on the spot, literally with an adjustable wrench to tighten the bolts on the valve, right next to this rocket then loaded with 900 tons of highly explosive fuel.
There was also another concern, at the level of a radar tracking station, necessary to follow the trajectory of the rocket, and which acted up: it stopped responding. Like what rocket take-offs hang by a thread, in this case a faulty Ethernet cable. There again, it had to be changed, tests carried out… All of this put together means that the rocket is a few minutes behind schedule.
At the end of the countdown, she lifted off, fired up her engines, four RS-25 engines, old engines from the Space Shuttle era, and her rocket boosters. The sound arrived, the time it traveled the five kilometers which separated our special envoy from the rocket…” It’s a power, we feel our clothes tremble with the shock wave of these powder pistons that propel it into the skies of Florida, the SLS (Space Launch System).After years of construction, many worries, takes off the new American lunar rocket, the successor of the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo missions, of the lunar missions. This time it is the Artemis program, the new lunar program of NASA which aims to return to the Moon. »
This launch has been expected here in the United States for years. ” NASA, which is once again adopting a lunar program, we are going to return to the Moon and the show is impressive since the sky is very clear and we can see the Moon precisely in the sky. The rocket is heading towards it, it’s quite impressive to see it like that in the sky of Florida, with this sky so clear, the trajectory seems nominal as we say in the jargon, we will soon see the thrusters . »
For this test flight, launched fifty years after the last flight of the Apollo program, the Orion capsule, which has no astronaut on board, will not land on the Moon but will venture up to 64,000 km behind it. , a record for a habitable ship.
The purpose of this Artemis 1 mission, which should last a little over 25 days, is to verify that this new vessel is safe to transport a crew to the Moon in the next few years.
► To read also: Mission Artemis 1: final preparations for NASA’s new lunar rocket