Thad Cochran Test Stand Flush Time Warp (SSC2026m000163)

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Water flowing out. Data flowing in. A water system activation at the Thad Cochran Test Stand (B-2) on Jan. 30 at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, helped capture critical data to support testing a new SLS (Space Launch System) stage expected to fly on the Artemis IV mission. The activation milestone tested new cooling systems that were added for the future Green Run test series of NASA’s exploration upper stage (EUS). The more powerful upper stage is a four-engine liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen in-space stage for the evolved Block 1B version of SLS. For Green Run, teams at NASA Stennis will activate and test all systems to ensure the stage is ready to fly. It will culminate with a hot fire of the stage’s four RL10 engines, just as during an actual mission. As part of the test stand modification, crews have added water-cooled diffusers to act as a heat shield to manage the super-hot exhaust from all four RL10 engines; water-cooled fairings to direct engine exhaust to align with the diffuser walls; and a purge ring that supplies cooling water and gaseous nitrogen to protect a flexible seal that allows the engines to move, or gimbal, during testing. These three systems all were integrated by the NASA Stennis team with the existing flame deflector and acoustic suppression equipment used during previous core stage testing for NASA’s SLS rocket ahead of the successful Artemis I launch. The exercise also pushed the high pressure industrial water system to…

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Wikimedia Commons, in Wikimedia Commons

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Public domain, as the Wikimedia Commons states it.

Credit

NASA Stennis Space Center

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