NASA Confident On Hot Fire Engine Test For Artemis Rocket - Project Engineers

NASA engineers are confident of success in the next hot firing of the Space Launch System's four engines for the Artemis project scheduled to take place next week, program manager John Honeycutt told a phone press conference on Friday

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th February, 2021) NASA engineers are confident of success in the next hot firing of the Space Launch System's four engines for the Artemis project scheduled to take place next week, program manager John Honeycutt told a phone press conference on Friday.

"We have a very high degree of confidence getting into the test next week - in the hardware, a really high degree of confidence," Honeycutt said. "We have completed all our data reviews. The engine performance on the first high hot fire test was really nominal right down the line."

The hot fire test is scheduled for Thursday, February 25 at the Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Engineers will power up all the core stage systems, load 700,000 gallons of cryogenic, or super cold, propellant into the tanks and fire all four engines at the same time, NASA said.

RS-25 rocket engine program director Jeff Zotti at Aerojet Rocketdyne agreed with Honeycutt's assessment.

"I agree we are very confident with our next test. We've been very satisfied with how the engines have been integrated into the vehicle. We achieved 109 percent power level [in the previous hot fire test]. We have a nice clean shut down. Next [goal] is getting more data on engine throttling," Zotti said.

On January 16, NASA conducted the first hot fire of the Artemis I core stage. All four RS-25 engines ignited successfully, but the test experienced an early shutdown after about 67 seconds due to conservative test parameters, the agency said.