The concept has precedent: the Saturn V could haul about 118 metric tons to Earth orbit, which enabled Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to schlep a heavy crew capsule, lander and ascent vehicle to the moon in just one trip.īy comparison, the space shuttle's payload capability maxed out at about 25 metric tons, and it took around three dozen spaceflights and 13 years to assemble the International Space Station. In both cases, NASA's plans centered around giant, heavy lift rockets capable of carrying massive amounts of cargo into orbit. Magnum was designed after the latter effort. Bush endorsed a Mars initiative that ultimately lost support after being saddled with a hastily derived, $500 billion price tag. A decade-and-a-half later in 1989, President George H. Part 3: Space in transition: How Obama's White House charted a new course for NASA To Mars, with big rocketsįresh off the moon landings in 1969, German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the mastermind behind the Saturn V rockets, unsuccessfully pitched Congress and the White House on a humans-to-Mars mission. Part 2: 'Apollo on Steroids': The Rise and Fall of NASA's Constellation Moon Program Part 1: How The Columbia Tragedy Shifted NASA's Sights To The Moon Need to catch up on our Horizon Goal series? The story of how SLS was born, however, involves a particularly messy tangle of politics and rocket science. NASA has been brainstorming ways to send astronauts to Mars with giant rockets for much of the agency's existence. Magnum had the same destination as SLS, too: Mars. Though never built, it was remarkably similar to SLS: It would have used space shuttle main engines, two shuttle solid rocket boosters, and a core stage based on the shuttle's external fuel tank. "This was Magnum," Lyles said, touching the model with the reverence one might show while flipping through an old photo album.ĭesigned in the 1990s, Magnum could have hauled around 80 metric tons of cargo to orbit. It was all white, with a red nose cone and engine section, and a blue upper stage.
When I visited Lyles last month, there was a model rocket on his desk that looked like a patriotically painted version of SLS. He's been at NASA for 40 years, and is now focused on making sure SLS stays on schedule for its maiden test flight in 2018. This unimaginatively named complex is NASA's design hub for the Space Launch System, or SLS, a giant, heavy lift rocket the agency plans to use to send humans to Mars in the 2030s.
The office of NASA rocket scientist Garry Lyles is located on the campus of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, inside a modern, five-story facility named Building 4220.
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