NASA Posts Space Launch System Acquisition Overview
WASHINGTON -- NASA has released the acquisition overview for the SpaceLaunch System (SLS). SLS is an entirely new advanced, heavy-lift
launch vehicle that will take the agency's astronauts farther into
space than ever before, create high-quality jobs here at home and
provide the cornerstone for America's future human space exploration efforts.
This new heavy-lift rocket - in combination with the Orion crew
capsule already under development, increased support for the
commercialization of astronaut travel to low Earth orbit, an
extension of activities on the International Space Station until at
least 2020, and a fresh focus on new technologies - is key to
implementing the plan laid out by President Obama and Congress in the
bipartisan 2010 NASA Authorization Act, which the president signed last year.
The booster will be America's most powerful since the Saturn V rocket
that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon and will launch humans to
places no one has gone before. The rocket will give the nation a
safe, affordable and sustainable means of reaching beyond our current
range of space exploration. It will open new discoveries from unique
vantage points and destinations far from Earth.
The SLS will carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and its
astronaut crew, cargo, equipment and science experiments to an
asteroid by the middle of the next decade and then to Mars.
The specific architecture was selected after analysis of the
combination of technologies that would effectively meet the SLS
capability requirements. The architecture also uses an evolvable
development approach. This type of approach allows NASA to address
high-cost development activities early on in the program while taking
advantage of higher buying power before inflation erodes the
available funding in a fixed budget.
To view the document on Fed Biz Ops, visit:
http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/cgi-
For information about NASA and human exploration, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/
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