Last year I saw the scrapping of the Orbiter tooling, this May I got to see what will most likely be the final Shuttle External Tank going through the major weld stations at Michoud, and now they’ve run the final SSME test at Stennis:
With 520 seconds of shake, rattle and roar on July 29, NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center marked the end of an era for testing the space shuttle main engines that have powered the nation’s Space Shuttle Program for nearly three decades.
This was the final planned test of a main engine for the shuttle, which currently is set to retire next year. More than 34 years ago, on June 27, 1975, Stennis engineers conducted the first test on one of the world’s most sophisticated rocket engines…
At one point, all three test stands at Stennis were involved in shuttle engine testing. Today, testing for the program occurs on the A-2 Test Stand as Stennis engineers prepare the A-1 Test Stand for testing the J-2X engine currently in development. That engine will help power the Ares I and Ares V rockets that will take humans back to the moon and possibly beyond as part of NASA’s newest space challenge – the Constellation Program.
NASA assigned Stennis to test space shuttle main engines in 1971. Prior to the first shuttle flight, Stennis engineers conducted some 500 tests on the engine and its components. They also test-fired the three-engine cluster arrangement – the main propulsion test article – that is used to power the shuttle, an accomplishment some called the facility’s “finest hour.”
Luckily, I got to see one of these tests back in April 2001:
Quite impressive – even from only about 200 yards away, the sound was felt more than heard.
With any luck I’ll get to see one or more of the Orbiters up-close next week while at KSC on business, but I still need to fit in a launch trip before the program ends.
