\u201cToday\u2019s test pushed the boundaries of large solid rocket motor design to meet rigorous performance requirements,\u201d Jim Kalberer, vice president of propulsion systems at Northrop Grumman, said in a statement. \u201cWhile the motor appeared to perform well through the most harsh environments of the test, we observed an anomaly near the end of the two-plus minute burn.\u201d<\/p>\n
The anomaly was likely caused by a faulty nozzle on the booster.\u00a0\u201cThe nozzle liberated energetically from the motor around 10 seconds before the burn ended, and there appeared to be some debris leaving the nozzle just before the main disintegration of the nozzle happened,\u201d NASA Spaceflight reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n Northrop Grumman developed the new booster under a $3.2 billion contract with NASA. The booster features carbon-fiber composite cases, which are meant to be lighter and stronger than the shuttle-era steel cases currently on SLS. Instead of the SLS booster\u2019s current hydraulic thrust vector control steering system, BOLE uses an electronic system. It also uses a different propellant formula that\u2019s meant to increase performance by around 10% and adds another five metric tons of payload.<\/p>\n NASA\u2019s massive, fully expendable Moon rocket is under heavy scrutiny. The 5.75-million-pound SLS was built using components from NASA\u2019s Space Shuttle program, which ran from 1981 to 2011. SLS is outfitted with four RS-25 engines originally built by Aerojet Rocketdyne for the shuttle project. NASA has a total of four contracts with Aerojet Rocketdyne for the RS-25 engines and Northrop Grumman for the boosters, which were also used during the Shuttle era, before the space agency switches to the newly designed BOLE. The new booster is intended for use on SLS beginning with Artemis 9, which is currently scheduled for 2034.<\/p>\n SLS is a capable heavy-lift rocket, but it\u2019s ultimately unaffordable<\/a>. The launch vehicle has already gone $6 billion over budget<\/a>, with the projected cost of each SLS rocket being $144 million more than anticipated. That would increase the overall cost of a single Artemis launch to at least $4.2 billion, according to a\u00a0report<\/a> released in 2024 by the office of NASA\u2019s inspector general. In its budget proposal for 2026, the U.S. administration laid out a plan to phase out SLS and its Orion capsule<\/a>, replacing them with commercial substitutes. To be clear, SLS is not officially dead, but it doesn\u2019t look good.<\/p>\n Despite the uncertainty surrounding SLS, NASA carried out another test of the rocket\u2019s components last week. On June 20, the agency tested an RS-25 engine at the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA\u2019s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. This was the first hot fire test of the new RS-25 engines, and it lasted around eight and a half minutes or \u201cthe same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during a launch of an SLS rocket on Artemis missions to the Moon,\u201d according to NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n NASA seems to be making progress with the new designs for its SLS rocket, but it\u2019s not clear whether these new parts will get to launch a mission to the Moon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While the fate of NASA\u2019s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket hangs in the balance, the agency is pushing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19651,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[3295,916,18436,159,18437,783,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-19650","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-artemis","9":"tag-nasa","10":"tag-northrop-grumman","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-sls","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114756578745349343","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19650\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Screen-Shot-2025-06-27-at-6.27.32-PM.jpg\")
A live stream of the static fire test showed the sudden explosion likely triggered by the nozzle anomaly. Credit: NASA <\/p>\n