NASA Aims to Accelerate SLS Megarocket for 2024 Moon Push

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Wednesday (March 27) that speeding up production of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket is absolutely essential to getting humans to the moon by 2024.

Bridenstine emphasized this point in a statement about U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's call Tuesday (March 26) to meet that goal, and the administrator discussed it in more depth yesterday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on NASA's budget request for 2020. That budget request delayed work on upgrades to the megarocket, whose first version is still under construction, and moved some of the SLS's prospective payloads to other spacecraft.

During a recent Senate hearing, Bridenstine had also mentioned the possibility of launching the Orion crew capsule on a private booster, so multiple questions at the House hearing concentrated on reconciling these statements

"If we're going to have boots on the moon by 2024, as the vice president indicated yesterday [was a goal], which I believe we can achieve, we're going to need SLS. We're going to need to accelerate it and get as many of those [technologies ready] as soon as possible, and we're going to need Exploration Upper Stage [EUS] as soon as possible," Bridenstine said during the hearing yesterday, referring to the advanced second stage that will allow SLS to carry larger payloads. The EUS does not receive funding in the current budget request.

Bridenstine went into more detail about how the agency planned to meet the vice president's deadline and to aim for a June 2020 first launch of SLS. However, he said he didn't think that exact launch date was "in the cards." Nonetheless, he said, SLS is essential to getting Orion flying as soon as possible.

"I did make the statement before the Senate a few weeks ago that we need to look at all options to maintain [the] schedule," Bridenstine said. "We did look at those commercial options, as you identified. We came to a determination that while some of those options are feasible, none of those options … are going to keep us within budget and on schedule."

Bridenstine added that the agency is doing a 45-day study about the best ways to pick up the pace on SLS without increasing cost. That study should produce results within a few weeks. He said NASA had purchased hardware to help integrate the rocket horizontally rather than vertically. This would allow for more of the rocket to be constructed without waiting for the engine section, which has proven to be more challenging to build than expected…

https://www.space.com/nasa-accelerate-sls-megarocket-moon-2024-push.html