LONDON: Twelve million horsepower — what a ride. This is the engine that may take us to Mars, and it’s just been fired up for the first time at a NASA testing facility.
The RS-25 engine was fired up at the Stennis Space Centre in Mississippi. It burned for nine minutes, chewing through nine swimming pools worth of fuel.
“It is the most complicated rocket engine out there on the market, but that’s because it’s the Ferrari of rocket engines,” NASA propulsion engineer Kathryn Crowe said.
The engine represents a significant boost in power and efficiency over past rockets — even though its design dates back to the 1970s.
NASA needs it if it is serious about returning to manned space flight. It lost that capability with the final flight of the Space Shuttle in 2011.
And orbit is just the first step: Going further is much harder.
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