NASA has been highly vocal about some of its upcoming plans to explore Europa, send humans to Mars, develop flying saucers among other project and the latest addition to the list is its plans of developing a next-generation rocket that will allow it to take us where no humans have ever gone before: To asteroids, Mars, and beyond.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and the European Space Agency’s Ariane 6 are two of the rockets that boast of such capabilities and are already under construction; however, neither of these compare to NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which will be the most powerful rocket in history if it’s fully funded to fruition.
According to NASA, its SLS rocket will stand 322 feet tall, generate 12 per cent more thrust than NASA’s Saturn V rocket, and ferry four astronauts at a time to deep-space on board NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
NASA is still working on the intricate details of the SLS including its two solid rocket boosters (which we see in the video above). According to NASA, each of which will weigh roughly 1.3 million pounds.
To fuel the excitement, NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center just released a video on June 9 [embedded above] of what it will look like when SLS finally does blast off for the first time. The first uncrewed test flight of SLS is scheduled for as early as November 2018.
