Inside Nasa’s giant rocket factory (BBC)

Richard Hollingham

It’s been decades since Nasa has had a rocket powerful enough to reach to the Moon – and beyond. But now the agency is building one that could venture even further into space. Richard Hollingham pays it a visit.

If you remember one fact from this story, make it this: America’s new rocket will be capable of carrying 12 fully grown elephants into orbit.

Before anyone protests about a gross misappropriation of taxpayers’ money, not to mention the associated animal rights issues, this is a purely hypothetical scenario Nasa uses in an attempt to illustrate the sheer scale and power of its new launcher.

The Space Launch System (SLS) will be taller than the Statue of Liberty, weigh more than seven-and-a-half fully loaded Boeing 747s and have more power than 13,400 locomotive engines. All that adds up to a rocket capable of taking humans beyond Earth orbit for the first time since the last Saturn V carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon in 1972.

“This will be a unique rocket,” says SLS systems engineer, Dawn Stanley. “It’s going to get us back to the Moon and beyond the Moon to asteroids and Mars, further than we’ve ever gone before.”
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150310-inside-nasas-giant-rocket-lab




Longish article about some of the technical aspects of building big rockets, not so much about where they'll go. Interesting read -- found out that NASA has the largest bike repair facility in the southern United States.

Lately, I've been hearing some (admittedly brief) static tests going off at Redstone. Been wondering what's going on -- it's not solid boosters (those are done in the Utah desert) and it's nothing as big as the Shuttle engines (which I believe are tested at Michoud now), but I'm not sure what else they're working on out there. I've read something about a hybrid (liquid-solid) engine being tested in some joint NASA-Army program, but the dates of these tests were publicly announced.