I was in turbo machinery and we were taking the brunt of some of the damage, so it was very exciting.” Four turbopumps are at the fiery heart of the engine’s design. “They started hot-fire testing engines in 1975, but in ’77 we were still burning up a fair amount of engines. Every design you were getting down on a physical drawing board with pens or pencils,” Bradley says. An engineering graduate fresh from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Bradley got a tip from a neighbor and applied at Rocketdyne to work on the shuttle program. Rocketdyne began production of the SSME on March 31, 1972, but it’d be another five years before Bradley would come on board. “And what’s better than going to the moon and Mars?” “It’s very gratifying to see those engines resurrected,” Bradley says. That puts the SSME, originally created with slide rules and paper, at the foundation of 21st-century human exploration. (A 2013 merger with Aerojet led to the company’s current name.) And it’s quite a comeback: SLS is the custom-built, off-planet ride for NASA’s Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface and later to land people on Mars. Now with the title of Deputy Program Manager at Aerojet Rocketdyne, Bradley is overseeing the rebirth of the SSME engine. It was sad, says Bradley, to see them decommissioned when they could have flown dozens more missions. The retirement of the space shuttle left Rocketdyne with a backlog of 16 engines, which the company mothballed. “I’ve been to many flights, but it was different for 135,” Bradley says. Doug Bradley was at Kennedy Space Center during that launch, working as a chief engineer for Rocketdyne. Among the four engines mounted to the SLS are numbers 20, both used on July 8, 2011, to launch the shuttle’s final mission, STS-135. Originally designed in the 1970s, the engines are seasoned, upgraded veterans, with 25 previous space shuttle flights among them.
Mounted at the bottom of the core stage are four RS-25 engines-formerly called the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME)-supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The 212-foot core stage rocket, along with a pair of solid rocket boosters, and the Orion crew module largely make up the Space Launch System (SLS), which NASA is counting on for its Artemis program’s 2026 return to the moon-a feat the agency last accomplished with Apollo 17 in 1972.ĭespite the decades between manned lunar launches, the SLS relies on a workhorse from the shuttle program. The heart of NASA's Space Launch System arrived at Kennedy Space Center last April as the agency's first human-rated deep space rocket in 50 years.
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