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Rocket Assembly Required

Season 1Aug 16, 2021

Twenty-four American astronauts went to the moon between 1968 and 1972. In the next few years, we are going back. To get there, we’ll need a dedicated team, and a powerful new rocket. NASA’s Sharon Cobb and Abdiel Santos Galindo take us through the many, many steps involved in preparing for launch.

NASA's Curious Universe

NASA’s Curious Universe

Season 3, Episode 6:Rocket Assembly Required

Tentative Release Date:Monday, August 16

Estimated Run Time:21:52

Introducing NASA’s Curious Universe

Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. Join NASA astronauts, scientists and engineers on a new adventure each week — all you need is your curiosity. Fly over the Antarctic tundra, explore faraway styrofoam planets, and journey deep into our solar system. First-time space explorers welcome.

About the Episode

Twenty-four American astronauts went to the moon between 1968 and 1972. In the next few years, we are going back. To get there, we’ll need a dedicated team, and a powerful new rocket. NASA’s Sharon Cobb and Abdiel Santos Galindo take us through the many, many steps involved in preparing for launch.

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NASA's Curious Universe

[Song: Perpetual Twilight Underscore by La Pinta]

Sharon Cobb

You just really can’t imagine everything that goes into preparing for a launch.

[Audio from STS-129 Launch: “T-minus Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Atlantis…”]

Sharon Cobb

There are hundreds of people that are involved. There are people across the country that are responsible for various aspects of the launch.

[Audio from STS-129 Launch: “Houston now controlling. Atlantis begins its penultimate journey to shore up the International Space Station…”]

Sharon Cobb

We have to make sure that all the systems are running, we’re looking at data that’s coming from each one of those systems, we have thousands of sensors on the rocket.

[Audio from STS-129 Launch: “Atlantis now in the proper alignment for it’s 8.5 minute ride to orbit…”]

Sharon Cobb

I have been working on this project from almost the very beginning of it and to see all these components come together and all these systems is just something that I cannot wait to see. And to be there on that day and to hear the rocket engines roar…

[Audio from STS-129 Launch: engine roar sound]

Sharon Cobb

And to see it lift off of the pad will be something that I just dream about.

Sharon Cobb

I just can’t wait.

[Theme Song: Curiosity by SYSTEM Sounds]

HOST PADI BOYD: This is NASA’s Curious Universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I’m Padi Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide!

HOST PADI BOYD: Teams across NASA are gearing up for a very exciting launch called Artemis I. This launch will be the first in a series of Artemis missions, which will culminate in bringing humans back to the Moon… for the first time since 1972!

HOST PADI BOYD: If everything goes according to plan, the first, un-crewed test flight, Artemis I, will take off later this year in 2021, out of Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The new rocket that will take us back to the Moon and beyond is called the Space Launch System or SLS.

HOST PADI BOYD: But how exactly does such a complicated machine come together? It takes a lot of moving pieces and a team of people paying very close attention.

Sharon Cobb

I’d love to describe my job as being a rocket scientist, but I’m not exactly that.

[Song: Data Dynamism Underscore by Moenks Wright]

Sharon Cobb

I have the privilege of getting to help with the design, development, production, manufacturing and test of the Space Launch System.

HOST PADI BOYD: This is Sharon Cobb, who has been working on the Space Launch System for most of its development. And while visiting the Moon won’t be a first for NASA, this rocket will have a lot of exciting new developments.

Sharon Cobb

The Space Launch System is the largest rocket that is currently being built. And it will allow us to carry humans to land on the Moon as well as going to Mars eventually.

Sharon Cobb

We’ve done incredible robotic missions on Mars. But we’ve never been able to send humans to Mars. So that’s something that we’re really looking forward to as an agency.

Sharon Cobb

Another one of the exciting things about the Artemis mission is that it’ll be the first time that a female has landed on the Moon. It’s gonna be really exciting. Can you imagine being the first woman to step on the moon? I think it’ll be an exciting time for all those watching and for those young girls to see what they can also look forward to in their future.

HOST PADI BOYD: There are a lot of moving pieces, both literally and figuratively, that it takes to get humans into space. And the vehicles in the Space Launch System are a really important part of that equation.

Sharon Cobb

So the Artemis program has multiple components to it, it has both the rocket and the crew capsule, Orion, that will be sending humans into space.

HOST PADI BOYD: The rocket itself consists of multiple engines and boosters that will propel it off the launch pad and into the atmosphere. The first flight in 2021 will make its way to the Moon without any people on it.

Sharon Cobb

For the first Artemis mission, it’ll take us about three to four days to get from launch to get the crew capsule into position and to do an orbital maneuver around the Moon. After that’s complete, they’ll return back to the Earth and we’ll be looking for things like the reentry and how well those systems perform.

Sharon Cobb

And so we’ll be doing a lot of tests, we’ll have a lot of sensors on that first flight, getting ready for the next flight that’ll have the crew on it.

HOST PADI BOYD: Team members from NASA Centers across the country have been working on preparing this rocket at the same time. Sharon’s team has been working out of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The launch itself will take place at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where NASA’s biggest missions usually come together and take off.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

My name is Abdiel Alexander Santos Galindo. And I am a ground integration engineer for the Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy Space Center.

[Song: Hedera Helix Instrumental by Dury]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

Artemis itself is the sister of Apollo, hence the name.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

The Apollo program had the opportunity of sending humans to the Moon. But we really didn’t stay there.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

And so we said to ourselves that we definitely need to go back. But this time, we have to go back and we have to stay. Because as humans, we kind of have this nature and this interest of just exploring. And so having the opportunity to go back to the Moon and kind of understand how to live and work there, gives us the opportunity to then eventually explore the other locations such as Mars and beyond as a multiplanetary species in a sense.

HOST PADI BOYD: You need a lot of lift power to fulfill these dreams of interplanetary travel. The SLS rocket has to be groundbreaking in both its size and force…in order to lift itself off the ground.

[Song: Drifting Underscore by Lipszyc Lipszyc]

HOST PADI BOYD: Again, this is Sharon Cobb.

Sharon Cobb

This is an enormous rocket. The Space Launch System, when it is built and integrated will be 322 feet tall. That’s taller than the Statue of Liberty. So it’s gonna be a massive rocket and it has incredible power, like we’ve never seen.

Sharon Cobb

One of the neat things about the Space Launch System is the fact that it will allow us to carry more cargo and more supplies to the Moon than anything else that’s currently in existence.

Sharon Cobb

If you can imagine that you’re going to be going on a very long journey, there’s a lot of things you have to take with you. And so this rocket has more lift capability and more power than any other rocket that is currently being built. It’s just going to give us a capability that’ll be able to help us explore for many years to come.

HOST PADI BOYD: Scientist Robert Goddard flew the first rocket almost 100 years ago, in 1926. That rocket didn’t go very far, only about 12.5 meters into the air, but it paved the way for more experimentation. It wasn’t until the space race in the 1950’s and 60’s that rockets sent some of the first objects and people into space.

HOST PADI BOYD: This was a time when “computers” weren’t what we think of today. In fact, the term “NASA computer” often referred to people who were doing complicated math by hand. Each person played a specific and important role in getting the first humans into space and onto the moon.

HOST PADI BOYD: Space flight technology has come leaps and bounds since then. And with all that development over time, scientists working on the Space Launch System didn’t have to start entirely from scratch.

Sharon Cobb

Building this rocket was an opportunity to build on the foundation of the Space Shuttle Program.

Sharon Cobb

We had a lot of really capable equipment that we used on the Space Shuttle Program… the engines, the boosters, the solid rocket boosters that we flew, those were all very capable pieces of equipment that we could reuse.

Sharon Cobb

But there were also some other pieces of equipment that needed to have more capability. And that was our first step was to try to marry all those really critical components of the rocket together and design the new ones that we had to, and then get those into production so that we could test them.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

At the end of the day, we are a government agency. So we want to make sure that everybody is participating on America’s rocket.

[Song: Shimmering Light Instrumental by Delves]

HOST PADI BOYD: Abdiel and his team at Kennedy are in the process of taking all the parts of the rocket and assembling them into one huge machine. The parts have come from all across the country – with different teams designing and building different pieces. Teams across NASA are equipped not only with different specialists to create these parts, they also have different facilities to make and test them.

HOST PADI BOYD: But the physical space you need to compile the whole rocket is only found in one place. Down at Kennedy, there’s a huge building called the Vehicle Assembly Building, or V-A-B.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

So the Vehicle Assembly Building was built during the Apollo program, so back in the 60s, maybe a little bit earlier than that.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

Every vehicle that NASA has made pretty much from the Apollo era forward, so we’re talking about the Saturn five, the one that took astronauts to the Moon, the space shuttle that did over 100 missions and built our International Space Station. And now the SLS rocket or the Space Launch System have all been assembled there.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

It’s a, it’s a really, really, really big building. It is a fascinating piece of landmark, I tend to call it the cathedral of space exploration.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

It’s this massive facility that has all the capabilities to kind of put together a rocket like a big Lego piece, and that’s kind of the cool part of the job. And then test out some of the equipment and roll it out to the pad.

HOST PADI BOYD: The VAB covers 8 acres of land and stands at 525 feet tall. There’s an American flag painted on the outside, that is 209 feet tall and 110 feet wide! Each star on the flag is 6 feet across.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

For me, it has been the most amazing thing that you get to see at NASA, even as you’re driving there. Florida is a pretty flat state.

[Wildlife sounds begin – birds, toads]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

So when you’re driving over to Kennedy Space Center, you really don’t see a lot of things other than just wilderness and all of the natural environments that are surrounding the Space Center.

[Wildlife sounds end]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

But you do get to see this one teeny, small little building on the far horizon, that’s like a white building, you can kind of discern a little logo on it. And as you get closer and closer to it, you see how ginormous this Vehicle Assembly Building is.

[Song: Dancer’s Dream Main Track by Cohen]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

So when you walk in there, you kind of lose perspective of how big things are and the size of everything. I mean, even for me who, I’ve been doing this job for a couple of years already, you get the chance to see everything at a completely different scale. So it’s like you all of a sudden become a minifigure. And you’re living in a Lego world and a Lego environment with all these pieces around you as they get assembled to launch into space.

HOST PADI BOYD: As you might imagine, putting a rocket together in just the right order with just the right pieces, can take time.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

The first equipments, the first major equipments, I guess, which we would call the solid rocket boosters, or the white tanks that are on the side of the vehicle itself. They were received, Oh, my, I think it was late or mid last year. It’s been a year since we started stacking and preparing these rockets and these vehicles. And that doesn’t include the preparation that went beforehand on the actual additional elements that are already at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

It’s very impressive to see the amount of work that goes behind the scenes into getting these rockets done and ready for launch. And it’s something that a lot of people maybe not necessarily see because they kind of just see the end product.

HOST PADI BOYD: Another vital aspect of rocket assembly is testing. The pieces of this rocket are huge and the power they emit is enormous, so it’s important to make sure they’re all working together the way we want them to. Sharon’s team at Marshall has done a lot of this important work on their portions of the rocket before it gets sent off for assembly.

Sharon Cobb

There’s been a tremendous test effort to build this rocket. It’s been everything from testing the very smallest components up to the system, like the engines have their own tests, the boosters have had their test.

[Green Run test sounds begin]

Sharon Cobb

We just recently back in the spring had an incredible test that tested all four of the RS-25 engines and the fuel tank that supplies the liquid oxygen and hydrogen to those engines.

HOST PADI BOYD: The fuel tanks make up what’s called the “Core Stage” of the rocket. This core stage stores all the liquid hydrogen and oxygen that will feed the rocket’s 4 engines.

Sharon Cobb

So they strapped this entire core stage down to the ground with enormous fixtures to keep it from flying away. They ran an eight minute test on all of four of those engines and emptied the fuel tank.

[Green Run test sounds end]

HOST PADI BOYD:This test was also known as the “Green Run” test. The term “Green” refers to the new hardware that will work together simultaneously for the first time.

Sharon Cobb

So it was an incredible test, you could feel the ground shake. And it was just, it was so exciting to see what that was going to be like when we launched this rocket. So it was, it was everything except the solid rocket boosters that we tested in that test.

HOST PADI BOYD:Making sure the engines work seems pretty straight forward. But when you’re working with such massive technology and overwhelming forces…

[Song: Sky Odyssey Underscore by Lascombes Lipszyc Lipszyc]

HOST PADI BOYD: There are a lot of other, more hidden factors to keep in mind.

Sharon Cobb

When those engines roar, there’s a lot of sound that’s generated by that. So we need to make sure that we don’t do any damage to the rocket, either when we launch it or in flight. And so what will our very next test will be what we call a modal test. And it’ll be looking at what the resonant frequencies are of the entire system as it’s put together.

Sharon Cobb

You’ve probably seen on TV, a singer sings at a really high volume and at a certain frequency. And they can actually break a glass by using their voice.

[Wine glas tap rings out]

Sharon Cobb

So what you’re seeing in something like that is where the singer’s frequency of her sound waves coming from her voice are hitting the resonant frequency of the glass and it shatters.

Sharon Cobb

And we want to make sure that we don’t do that with any of the components in our rocket. So we’ll be doing a test with over 300 sensors on the rocket that will be trying to figure out exactly what that resonant frequency is of the entire stacked rocket so that we make sure that when we fly the rocket, we don’t do anything to break it.

HOST PADI BOYD: Building a rocket takes a lot of time.

HOST PADI BOYD: But as we approach that take-off countdown, the excitement for Abdiel and his ground system team starts to build…as everything comes together.

[Song: Emboldened Willpower 1 Underscore by Goodman]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

When we are in preparation for actually getting the vehicle for launch, or getting rolled out of the Vehicle Assembly Building, there’s a lot of final checkups and final systems verifications to make sure that everything is working and operating properly.

[VAB assembly sounds begin – truck beeps and fans]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

If you’ve ever been in a construction environment, where they’re kind of like in the peak of the day, and there’s a lot of noises going on, trucks backing up, people taking stuff out of out of the trucks themselves

[Pause for assembly sounds]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

Final mechanisms being tested and ready to go, final buildups being put together, that’s what it is to be at the VAB.

[VAB assembly sounds end]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

And it’s this magnificent, massive building, that thing’s sometimes even echo off of it. So you get the chance to appreciate that a little bit more. So it’s like this somewhat chaotic, but prepared and ready to go operation.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

In the near future, we will be having our vehicle coming out of the Vehicle Assembly Building and those high bays, so pretty much those side doors that are on the Vehicle Assembly Building, there’s four of them in total.

[Sound of high bay doors rolling up begins]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

One of those is going to completely roll all the way up.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

And that’s something that we have not seen in years because the shuttle only really needed about half of those doors if not less than that.

[Sounds of high bay doors rolling up ends]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

So those doors are going to roll all the way up and you’re going to get the chance to see that Space Launch System and Orion capsule just rolling out of this building with the massive crawler and the massive mobile launcher, and just getting everybody to wave it away for, for one final time, even though it’s going to visit again. I think it’s going to be a very exhilarating opportunity to be a part of, I cannot wait to be a part of it.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

And you kind of get to see your masterpiece or some might say your little kid finally go off into college and to experiencing the new world.

[Song: Inner Peace Instrumental by Lamay]

Abdiel Santos Galindo

A lot of hard work is the key of preparation into getting to the Artemis launch. We’ve almost had a decade of work in pre-planning, design, development, testing, evaluation and certification of all of our different components. So if you’re just joining us in our journey, I think you kind of got here to the best point of it all because we’re at that final phase where we’re kind of putting everything together and we’re building it up.

HOST PADI BOYD: In 1969, three astronauts journeyed to the Moon without the help of a lot of the technology we rely on today. It took over 400,000 people working behind the scenes to get those astronauts into space and safely on the moon.

HOST PADI BOYD: Now, over 50 years later, we are taking everything we’ve learned about space, physics, and our amazing leaps in technology to bring humanity back to the Moon and further into space.

HOST PADI BOYD: And just like before, it’s going to take another incredible group of hardworking people to usher humanity into the next era of exploration.

[Song: Curiosity Outro by SYSTEM Sounds]

HOST PADI BOYD: This is NASA’s Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold, Kate Steiner and Micheala Sosby, with support from Emma Edmund and Priya Mittal.

HOST PADI BOYD: Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.

HOST PADI BOYD: Special thanks to Derrol Nail, Tracy McMahan, Antonia Jaramillo, Brittney Thorpe, Madison Tuttle and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

HOST PADI BOYD: If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show @NASA, and sharing NASA’s Curious Universe with a friend.

HOST PADI BOYD: Still curious about NASA? You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one and we’ll try to track down the answers! You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-CuriousUniverse@mail.NASA.gov. Go to nasa.gov/curiousuniverse for more information.

BONUS SCENE:

Abdiel Santos Galindo

So we’re talking about the crawler, which I know that we had a podcast on that recently. So I invite the viewers to kind of take a look at that and learn more about it.

Producer Christina Dana

Perfect, I could not have scripted a better call out to the Crawler’s episode, so thank you so much for that.

Abdiel Santos Galindo

I got you, don’t worry!

GARY JORDAN/ HOUSTON WE HAVE A PODCAST PROMO:Hey there NASA superfans, I hope you enjoyed this episode on the Artemis program.

GARY JORDAN: If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how all that works, I think you’ll love “Houston, We Have a Podcast”, the official podcast of the NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. I’m Gary Jordan, I host the show. Each week, we take a deep dive into unique and interesting topics, mostly around human spaceflight.

GARY JORDAN:On Friday, Aug. 20, we’ll have an episode where we sit down with a few of the flight directors that will be controlling the Artemis I mission – the uncrewed test flight of the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule.

GARY JORDAN: They share their perspective of Artemis I from inside Mission Control in Houston, and they describe the important things to consider at each step before deciding to give a “Go to proceed” during the flight around the Moon. We also did a special recording of this episode on video – so check out our episode webpage for the link to watch that.

GARY JORDAN: Listen to Houston We Have a Podcast on your favorite podcast app, or find us and other podcasts at nasa.gov/podcasts.