NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) should be able to reach the high-retrograde lunar orbit where the agency wants to reposition a small asteroid, based on the results of its successful preliminary design review (PDR).
Top SLS managers at Marshall Space Flight Center say the planned 321-ft.-tall, 70-ton-capability block 1 vehicle passed muster with a series of review boards for a first flight in 2017. That unmanned mission is tentatively set to fly 7,000 km (4,350 mi.) behind the Moon, according to SLS Chief Engineer Garry Lyles, provided upcoming wind tunnel tests validate operational solutions to some transonic buffeting engineers believe the big new rocket will experience on ascent.
While the fate of the asteroid relocation mission is the subject of partisan debate on Capitol Hill, Lyles says the lunar orbit targeted for an eventual astronaut/asteroid rendezvous remains the primary design reference mission for the SLS first flight. Placing astronauts in that orbit with an Orion crew vehicle would be the first human mission beyond low Earth orbit since the Apollo era, and is NASA’s goal regardless of the outcome of the relocation debate because of the technologies it would exercise.
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