Washington (AFP)
NASA was scheduled to test Thursday its new giant SLS rocket, which will one day take astronauts to the Moon, after a previous test cut short in January.
During this "hot fire" test of the main stage of the rocket, the four RS-25 engines will be ignited for eight minutes, and the tanks filled with 2.6 million liters of fuel, to simulate a launch phase.
The test takes place at the Stennis Test Center in Mississippi (south).
A two hour window was possible to achieve it, from 19:00 GMT.
At the end of January in a similar test, the engines shut down much earlier than expected, after just over a minute of ignition.
Following the incident, the US space agency had declared that no "major repairs" were necessary.
The SLS (Space Launch System) heavy rocket is already years behind schedule.
It is a powerful launcher intended to carry the Orion spacecraft, as part of the American program Artemis back to the Moon.
If the test is successful, the rocket will then be transported to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A first flight, Artemis 1, scheduled for later this year according to the initial schedule, will be with the Orion capsule at its top, without an astronaut on board.
Artemis 2, in 2023, will send astronauts around the moon, but they will not land.
Finally Artemis 3 will send two astronauts to the lunar soil, including the first woman, in theory in 2024.
In its configuration for Artemis 1, the SLS rocket will be larger than the Statue of Liberty and more powerful than the famous Saturn V which took American astronauts to the Moon in the last century.
Space company SpaceX is also developing a heavy launcher, Starship, to reach the Moon and even Mars.
The last tests of this rocket ended in impressive explosions.
A new test of a Starship prototype could take place in the coming days.
© 2021 AFP