Stennis Space Center, Miss., Celebrates 30 Years of Shuttle Engine Tests
Posted on: Thursday, 11 August 2005, 18:00 CDT
Aug. 11--STENNIS SPACE CENTER -- Pat Mooney doesn't have to try very hard to remember what it was like at Stennis Space Center three decades ago when testing began on the space shuttle main engines.
It was a key event, and a lot of hard work.
"There was a lot of excitement and a lot of joy because we made a major milestone," Mooney said about a series of tests in the 1970s that eventually led to the main engine test.
A shuttle engine test today will mark the 30th anniversary celebration of shuttle engine tests at Stennis Space Center. NASA astronauts and project managers and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne (formerly Boeing) officials will be on hand.
Since the first test on May 19, 1975, the NASA and contractor team has conducted more than 2,200 tests on SSMEs, including the ones that propelled Discovery into orbit.
The first test was in fact the culmination of a series of tests. Ten were conducted in the first two months to help establish fuel preburner, oxygen preburner and main combustion chamber ignition.
Three years later, test teams at SSC were firing the main propulsion test article -- the three-engine cluster that helps propel the space shuttle into orbit.
The testing of the shuttle engines was significant for Stennis, which in 1971 saw the end of testing of the Saturn V rockets used in the Apollo program.
Mooney, technical assistant to the director of the Propulsion Test Directorate, was at Stennis during the Saturn/shuttle transition.
Most of the facility virtually shut down at the end of the Apollo program. But in time it started staffing up to test shuttle engines.
Mooney, who was working for a contractor then as system test engineer, said there was a lot of work involved, reconfiguring two test stands built in the 1960s to test the first and second stages of the Apollo Saturn V rocket.
It was a matter of baby steps that had to be taken first before getting to the key test of the shuttle engine. He recalls one test in 1976 that he considered key. It lasted 6.6 seconds.
There have been 114 missions since the first space shuttle took flight from Kennedy Space Center on April 12, 1981, all powered by engines tested at Stennis.
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Source: The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)
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