NASA just officially announced the SLS launch date to beat SpaceX’s Starship to orbit!

The Eagle has landed. On July 20, 1969, NASA's astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Buzz Aldrin touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, becoming the first humans to ever land on the moon. Flash forward 53 years and NASA has used the anniversary to announce tentative launch dates for the first major stage of a mission designed to put human boots on the moon again. At a Wednesday briefing, NASA officials announced that they had target launch dates of August 29, September 2, and September 5 for the Artemis I mission, an uncrewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft and the first launch of the SLS. The long-awaited Artemis I launch will send an unpiloted Orion crew capsule on a test flight beyond the moon and back, ending with a blistering 25,000 mph re-entry, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun. That will expose the spacecraft's heat shield to temperatures as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, proving whether or not Orion is ready to survive the mission or if parts of its design need to go back to the drawing board. If the initial test flight goes well, NASA plans to launch four astronauts atop the second SLS rocket for an around-the-moon shakedown flight in 2024, aptly named the Artemis II. Before sending the first woman and the first person of color to a landing near the moon's south pole in 2025 or 2026 as part of the Artemis III mission. Interestingly enough, if everything goes according to plan, the Artemis I mission will also confirm SLS's status as the biggest, most powerful operational space rocket on Earth. Because Starship, Space Titan SpaceX's flagship rocket, the only other can that can vie with SLS, still is stuck on the ground. Without Biden politicizing FAA's sudden newfound foot-dragging amorphous environmental review, SpaceX would have conducted a Starship test launch months ago with the iconic serial number pair of 420, acquiring vital data, retiring risk, refining vehicle and facility slash tower design, launching the second Starship, and so on. But that's only an if. Despite that, NASA still needs to perform the launch as soon as possible, because the given situation just allows the FAA to keep Starship at Starbase until September at most. Even if the FAA continues to introduce new conditions to delay Starship launch at Starbase, please don't forget that SpaceX still has backup plans, specifically in Florida. Everything is making good progress there, and the web may come alive in the next few months. Thus, if NASA doesn't speed things up, it will be overtaken by SpaceX. Jim Free, NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development, also emphasized on the call that, we think we're on a good path to get to attempts on those dates. Crews have been working on SLS and Orion since it returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building on July 2nd after the fourth wet dress rehearsal test where the rocket was loaded with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants and put through a practice countdown. That included work to fix a liquid hydrogen leak on the core stage found during that test. During the work, technicians discovered a loose fitting, called a collet, where the liquid hydrogen umbilical connects to the rocket. That required going into the rocket's engine section to tighten the fitting. That actually gave us a little pause of wondering if we were going to be able to make a launch date on those three dates, Free said. With those repairs complete, he said he was more confident about being ready for those dates. Free and other NASA officials on the call cautioned they still had work to perform on both SLS and Orion to get the vehicles ready for launch. The three launch dates have different launch windows and mission durations as follows. The August 29th launch window opens at 8.33am Eastern for two hours and would result in a 42-day mission ending with a splashdown on October 10th. The September 2nd launch window opens at 12.48pm Eastern for two hours and would result in a 39-day mission splashing down on August 11th. The September 5th launch window opens at 5.12pm Eastern for 90 minutes and would result in a 42-day mission splashing down on August 17th. All three are considered long-class missions by NASA, while launch opportunities on other days instead support shorter missions lasting about four weeks. We don't have a strong preference of whether it's a short or long-class mission, said Mike Serafin, NASA Artemis mission manager. Both support all the mission objectives of testing the launch vehicle and spacecraft, with a particular emphasis on demonstrating Orion's heat shield on a re-entry at lunar return velocities. So if NASA doesn't meet these dates, the next window to launch opens in late September. The windows are dictated by the position of the moon in relation to the Earth, so that SLS can successfully get into the proper path around the moon, and they must allow for the Orion crew capsule to be illuminated by the sun for most of the flight so it can get enough rays on its solar panels. NASA has a list of all the windows as well as the criteria for them. If NASA rolls out SLS to the launch pad in mid-August but cannot launch by September 5th, then the rocket's liftoff could see a significant delay. It all has to do with the SLS's flight termination system, which is used to destroy the rocket if something goes catastrophically wrong during the launch and the vehicle starts to veer off course. Teams must fully test the flight termination system before launch, and that work can only be done inside the VAB. Once the SLS is rolled out from the VAB, there is a 20-day time limit for the flight termination system before it has to be tested again. That means the rocket has to launch within 20 days of its rollout or it must be returned to the VAB so that the flight termination system can get checked out again. That testing takes time, so if SLS is forced to come back to the VAB after rolling out in August, chances are it wouldn't be ready to fly until late October. There is the possibility with that, that we could potentially hit the late September launch period, Cliff Lanham, Senior Vehicle Operations Manager for Exploration Ground Systems at NASA's Kennedy Space Center said during the press conference. But that would be a real challenge for us, I'll be honest with you. But we would certainly give it our best shot at that point. Whenever it flies, the initial SLS Block 1 rocket will be the most powerful ever built for NASA, generating a record 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff using four Shuttle Heritage RS-25 main engines and two five-segment solid-fuel boosters. Future variants will ramp that power level up to 9.5 million pounds of thrust using upgraded boosters. For comparison, NASA's legendary Saturn V rocket that propelled astronauts to the moon in the Apollo program generated 7.5 million pounds of push using five huge F-1 engines. The timeline could still certainly shift in the coming weeks, but for now, NASA has some seblins of a schedule for SLS's launch, and this rocket may actually see space this year. And with that, today's episode has come to an end. If you enjoy what my team and I are doing, you can become a patron through our Patreon link in the description below. And as a quick note, if you have advertising needs, you can contact us directly via email. Otherwise, as always, this is Kevin with GreatSpaceX, and my team and I will see you next time. Until then, thank you so much for watching, and have a good one.