NASA Orion Spacecraft Next-gen Space Launch System Reports Major Milestone in Progress

With the Space Shuttle fleet now well into retirement, and American astronauts relying on Russian rockets to get to the International Space Station (ISS), the recent announcement from NASA this week comes as welcomed news. According to the agency, the design teams working on the core launch system for the next-generation Orion spacecraft have reached a significant milestone.

Known as the Space Launch System (SLS), the platform is critical to the success of the upcoming Orion spacecraft program which will get the U.S. back into manned space flight from its home soil. This week NASA reported that the core stage preliminary design review (PDR), held Thursday at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to ensure the design meets system requirements within acceptable risk and falls within schedule and budget constraints, revealed important progress.

“Passing a preliminary design review within 12 months of bringing Boeing on contract shows we are on track toward meeting a 2017 launch date,” said Tony Lavoie, manager of the SLS Stages Element at Marshall. “We can now allow those time-critical areas of design to move forward with initial fabrication and proceed toward the final design phase — culminating in a critical design review in 2014 — with confidence.”

On its first launch in 2017, the flight test of the SLS will be in a configuration for a 70-metric ton lift capacity and an unmanned Orion spacecraft beyond the moon. When complete, the final design on the SLS will include a two-stage launch vehicle with a lift capability of 130-metric tons allowing for deep space exploration and other missions beyond the former limits of the Shuttle fleet which was restricted to low-Earth orbit.

“Each individual element of this program has to be at the same level of maturity before we can move the program as a whole to the next step,” SLS Program Manager Todd May said. “The core stage is the rocket’s central propulsion element and will be an optimized blend of new and existing hardware design. We’re building it with longer tanks, longer feed lines and advanced manufacturing processes. We are running ahead of schedule and will leverage that schedule margin to ensure a safe and affordable rocket for our first flight in 2017.”