NASA's Curious Universe - Rocket Assembly Required

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Twenty-four American astronauts went to the moon between 1968 and 1972. In the next few years, we are going back. To get there, we’ll need a dedicated team, and a powerful new rocket. NASA’s Sharon Cobb and Abdiel Santos Galindo take us through the many, many steps involved in preparing for launch.

You just really can't imagine everything that goes into preparing for a launch. T-Menus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5. Lift off of space shuttle and land. There are hundreds of people that are involved. There are people across the country that are responsible for various aspects of the launch. Houston now controlling. Atlantis begins its penultimate journey to shore off the international. space station. We have to make sure that all the systems are running. We're looking at data

that's coming from each one of those systems. We have thousands of sensors on the rocket. Land us now on the proper alignment for its eight and a half minute, wind to orbit. I have been working on this project from almost the very beginning of it and to see all these components come together and all these systems is just something that I cannot wait to see and to be there on that day and to hear the rocket engines roar and to see it lift up to off of the path will be something that I just dream about. I just can't wait. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. Teams across NASA are gearing up for a very exciting

launch called Artemis I. This launch will be the first in a series of Artemis Missions, which will culminate in bringing humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972. If everything goes according to plan, the first uncrewed test flight, Artemis I, will take off later this year in 2021 out of Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The new rocket that will take us back to the moon and beyond is called the Space Launch System, or SLS. But how exactly does such a complicated machine come together? It takes a lot of moving pieces and a team of people paying very close attention. I love to describe my job as being a rocket scientist,

but I'm not exactly that. I have the privilege of getting to help with the design, development, production, manufacturing, and test of the space launch system. This is Sharon Cobb, who has been working on the space launch system for most of its development. And while visiting the moon won't be a first for NASA, this rocket will have a lot of exciting new developments. The space launch system is the largest rocket that is currently being built, and it will allow us to carry humans to land on the moon as well as going to Mars eventually. We've done incredible robotic missions on Mars.

but we've never been able to send humans to Mars. So that's something that we're really looking forward to as an agency. Another one of the exciting things about the Artemis mission is that it'll be the first time that a female has landed on the moon. It's going to be really exciting. Can you imagine being the first woman to step on the moon? I think it'll be an exciting time for all those watching and for those young girls to see what they can also look forward to in their future.

There are a lot of moving pieces, both literally and figuratively, that it takes to get humans into space. And the vehicles in the space launch system are a really important part of that equation. So the Artemis program has multiple components to it. It has both the rocket and the crew capsule Orion that will be sending humans into space. The rocket itself consists of multiple engines and boosters that will propel it off. the launch pad and into the atmosphere. The first flight in 2021 will make its way to the moon without any people on it. For the first Artemis mission, it'll take us about three to four days to get from launch, to get the crew capsule into position and to do an orbital maneuver around

the moon. After that's complete, they'll return back to the Earth and we'll be looking for things like the reentry and how well those systems perform. And so we're doing a lot of test. We'll have a lot of sensors on that first flight, getting ready for the next flight that'll have the crew on it. Team members from NASA centers across the country have been working on preparing this rocket at the same time. Sharon's team has been working out of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The launch itself will take place at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where NASA's biggest missions usually come together and take off. My name is Abdel Alexander Santos Galindo,

and I am a ground integration engineer for the Exploration Ground Systems Program at Kennedy Space Center. Artemis itself is the sister of Apollo, hence the name. The Apollo program had the opportunity of sending humans to the moon, but we really didn't stay there.

And so we said to ourselves that we definitely need to go back, But this time we have to go back and we have to stay because as humans, we kind of have this nature and this interest of just exploring. And so having the opportunity to go back to the moon and kind of understand how to live and work there gives us the opportunity to then eventually explore the other locations such as Mars and beyond as a multi-planetary species in a sense. You need a lot of lift power to fulfill these dreams of interplanetary. travel. The SLS rocket has to be groundbreaking in both its size and force in order to lift itself off the ground. Again, this is Sharon Cobb. This is an enormous rocket. The space launch system, when it is built and integrated, will be 322 feet tall. That's taller than the Statue of Liberty.

So it's going to be a massive rocket and it has incredible power like we've never seen. One of the neat things about the space launch system is the fact that it will allow us to carry more cargo and more supplies to the moon than anything else that's currently in existence. If you can imagine that you're going to be going on a very long journey, there's a lot of things you have to take with you. And so this rocket has more lift capability and more power than even. any other rocket that is currently being built. It's just going to give us a capability that'll be able to help us explore for many years to come. Scientist Robert Goddard flew the first rocket

almost 100 years ago in 1926. That rocket didn't go very far, only about 12.5 meters into the air, but it paved the way for more experimentation. It wasn't until the space race in the 1950s and 60s, that rockets sent some of the first objects and people into space. This was a time when computers weren't what we think of today. In fact, the term NASA computer often referred to people who were doing complicated math by hand.

Each person played a specific and important role in getting the first humans into space and onto the moon. Spaceflight technology has come leaps and bound since then. And with all that development over time, scientists working on the space launch system didn't have to start entirely from scratch. Building this rocket was an opportunity to build on the foundation of the space shuttle program. We had a lot of really capable equipment that we used on the space shuttle program. The engines, the boosters, the solid rocket boosters that we flew, those were all very capable pieces of equipment that we could reuse. But there were also some other pieces of equipment that needed to have more capability. And that was our first step, was to try to marry all those really critical components of the rocket together

and design the new ones that we had to and then get those into production so that we could test them. At the end of the day, we are a government agency, so we want to make sure that everybody is participating on America's rocket. Obdiel and his team at Kennedy are in the process of taking all the parts of, of the rockets and assembling them into one huge machine. The parts have come from all across the country, with different teams designing and building different pieces. Teams across NASA are equipped not only with different specialists to create these parts,

they also have different facilities to make and test them. But the physical space you need to compile the whole rocket is only found in one place. Down at Kennedy, there's a huge, There's a huge building called the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB. So the vehicle assembly building was built during the Apollo program. So back in the 60s, maybe a little bit earlier than that, every vehicle that NASA has made pretty much from the Apollo era forward.

So we're talking about the Saturn 5, the one that took astronauts to the moon, the space shuttle that did over 100 missions and built our international space station. And now the SLS rocket or the space launch. system have all been assembled there. It's a really, really, really big building. It is a fascinating piece of landmark. I tend to call it the cathedral of space exploration. It's this massive facility that has all the capabilities to kind of put together a rocket like a big Lego piece, and that's kind of the cool part of the job, and then test out some of the equipment and roll it out to the pad. The FEEAB covers eight acres of

land and stands at 525 feet tall. There's an American flag painted on the outside that is 209 feet tall and 110 feet wide. Each star on the flag is six feet across. For me, it has been the most amazing thing that you get to see at NASA, even as you're driving there. Florida has a pretty flat state. So when you're driving over to Kennedy Space Center, you really don't see a lot of things other than just wilderness.

and all the natural environments that are surrounding the space center. But you do get to see this one teeny small little building on the far horizon that's like a white building. You can kind of discern a little logo on it. And as you get closer and closer to it, you see how ginormous this vehicle assembly building is. So when you walk in there,

you kind of lose perspective of how big things are and the size of everything. I mean, even for me who I've been doing this job for a couple of years already, you get the chance to see everything at a completely different scale. So it's like you've all of a sudden become a mini figure and you're living in a Lego world and a Lego environment with all these pieces around you

as they get assembled to launch into space. As you might imagine, putting a rocket together in just the right order with just the right pieces can take time. The first equipment, the first major equipment, I guess, which we would call the solid rocket boosters or the white tanks that are on the side of the vehicle itself, They were received, oh my, I think it was late or mid last year. It's been a year since we started stacking and preparing these rockets and these vehicles.

And that doesn't include the preparation that went beforehand on the actual additional elements that are already at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation. It's very impressive to see the amount of work that goes behind the scene into getting these rockets done and ready for launch. And it's something that a lot of people maybe not necessarily see because they kind of just see the end product. Another vital aspect of rocket assembly is testing. The pieces of this rocket are huge, and the power they emit is enormous. So it's important to make sure they're all working together the way we want them to. Sharon's team at Marshall has done a lot of this important work

on their portions of the rocket before it gets sent off for assembly. There's been a tremendous test effort to build this rocket. It's been everything from testing the very smallest, components up to the system like the engines have their own test, the boosters have had their test. We just recently, back in the spring, had an incredible test that tested all four of the RS-25 engines and the fuel tank that supplies the liquid oxygen and hydrogen to those engines. The fuel tanks make up what's called the core stage of the rocket. This core stage stores all the liquid hydrogen and oxygen that will feed the rocket.

its four engines. So they strapped this entire core stage down to the ground with enormous fixtures to keep it from flying away. They ran an eight-minute test on all four of those engines and emptied the fuel tank. This test was also known as the Green Run test. The term green refers to the new hardware that will work together simultaneously for the first time.

So it was an incredible test. You could feel the ground shake, and it was just, it was so exciting to see what that was going to be like when we launched this rocket. So it was everything except the solid rocket boosters that we tested in that test. Making sure the engines work seems pretty straightforward. But when you're working with such massive technology and overwhelming forces, there are a lot of other, more hidden factors to keep in mind. when those engines roar, there's a lot of sound that's generated by that.

So we need to make sure that we don't do any damage to the rocket, either when we launch it or in flight. And so our very next test will be what we call a modal test, and it'll be looking at what the resonant frequencies are of the entire system as it's put together. You've probably seen on TV a singer sings at a really high volume, and at a certain frequency, and they can actually break a glass by using their voice. So what you're seeing in something like that is where the singer's frequency of her sound waves coming from her voice are hitting the resonant frequency of the glass and it shatters.

And we want to make sure that we don't do that with any of the components in our rocket. So we'll be doing a test with over 300 sensors on the rocket that will be trying to figure out exactly what that resonant frequency is of the entire stack rocket so that we make sure that when we fly the rocket, we don't do anything to break it. Building a rocket takes a lot of time. But as we approach that takeoff countdown, the excitement for Abdel and his ground system team starts to build

as everything comes together. When we are in preparation for actually getting the vehicle for launch or getting a rolled out of the vehicle assembly building, there's a lot of final checkups and final systems verifications to make sure that everything is working and operating properly. If you've ever been in a construction environment where they're kind of like in the peak of the day and there's a lot of noises going on, trucks backing up,

people taking stuff out of the trucks themselves, final mechanisms being tested and ready to go, final buildups bidding put together, that's what it is to be at the BAB. And it's this magnificent, massive building that things sometimes even echo off of it, so you get the chance to appreciate that a little bit more. So it's like this somewhat chaotic but prepared and ready to go operation. In the near future, we will be having our vehicle coming out of the vehicle assembly building and those high base, so pretty much those side doors that are on the vehicle assembly building, there's four of them in total. One of those is going to completely roll all the way up. And that's something that we have not seen in years because the shuttle only really needed about half of those doors, if not less than that.

So those doors are going to roll all the way up and you're going to get the chance to see that space launch system and Orion capsule just rolling out of this building with a massive crawler and the massive mobile launcher and just getting everybody to wave it away for one, final time, even though it's going to visit again. I think it's going to be a very accelerating opportunity to be a part of. I cannot wait to be a part of it. And you kind of get to see your masterpiece, or some might say, your little kid, finally go off into college, into experiencing the new world. A lot of hard work is the key of preparation into getting to the Artemis launch. We've almost had a decade of work in pre-planning, design, development, testing, evaluation, and certification

of all of our different components. So if you're just joining us in our journey, I think you kind of got here to the best point of it all, because we're at that final phase where we're kind of putting everything together and we're building it up. In 1969, three astronauts journeyed to the moon without the help of a lot of the technology we rely on today. It took over 400,000 people working behind the scenes to get those astronauts into space and safely on the moon. Now, over 50 years later, we are taking everything we've learned about space, physics, and our amazing leaps in technology to bring humanity back to the moon and further into space. And just like before, it's going to take another incredible group of hardworking people.

to usher humanity into the next era of exploration. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Kate Steiner, and Michaela Sosby, with support from Emma Edmund and Priya Mittal. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguita of System Sounds. Special thanks to Daryl Nail, Tracy McMahon, Antonia Haramio Bortero,

Brittany Thorpe, Madison Tuttle, and NASA's Kennedy Space Center. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing NASA's curious universe with a friend. Still curious about NASA? You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers. You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curious Universe at mail.nassah.gov. Go to nassah.gov slash curious universe for more information.

So we're talking about The Crawler, which I know that we had a podcast on that recently. So I invite the viewers to kind of take a look at that and learn more about it. Perfect. I cannot have scripted a better call-out to the Crawlers. So thank you so much for that. I got you. Don't worry. Hey there, NASA Superfans. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Curious Universe on the Artemis program. If you're fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how all of that works,

I think you'll love Houston. We have a podcast, the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. I'm Gary Jordan. I host the show. Each week, we take a deep dive into unique and interesting topics, mostly around human spaceflight. On Friday, August 20th, we'll have an episode where we sit down with a few of the flight directors that will be controlling the Artemis 1 mission, the uncrewed test flight of the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule. They share their perspective of Artemis 1 from inside mission control in Houston,

and they describe the important things to consider at each step before deciding to give a go-to-proceed during the flight around the moon. We also did a special recording of this episode on video, so check out our episode webpage for a link to watch that. Listen to Houston, we have a podcast on your favorite podcast app, or find us and other podcasts at nassadgov slash podcasts.