Northrop Grumman saw a fiery drama while testing a more powerful version of the solid rocket booster, which will be used if NASA’s Artemis program reaches its ninth launch using the bewildered space-fire system rocket.
Thursday’s live stream of 156-foot-long booster obsolescence and life expectancy extension (Bole) solid rocket motor static fires blew an end nozzle and black smoke that sprang around the camera from a test site in Northrop, Promontory, Utah.
“Oops,” said one of the test controllers in the stream just after the 100-second mark of a hot fire. Lieing on that side, the booster was burning the same amount of fuel as if it were used at startup.
Northrop Grumman officials spoke to the end of the nozzle in a press release later Thursday.
“Today’s testing pushed the boundaries of large-scale solid rocket motor designs to meet stringent performance requirements,” said Jim Calveler, Vice President of Propulsion Systems at Northrop Grumman. “The motor appeared to work well throughout the most demanding environments in the test, but anomalies were observed near the end of the burns that lasted more than two minutes.”
This test is for a booster that will not fly for at least the next decade, and is only available if NASA sticks to the SLS as a rocket option for the Artemis mission.
“As a new design and as the largest segmented solid rocket booster ever built, this test provides valuable data to iterate through the design for future development,” says Kalberer.
The current NASA plan launches the first eight Artemis, each using SLS rockets with boosters that generate 3.4 million pounds of thrust. The pair combined with the core stage created £8.8 million thrust for the Artemis, which was launched in 2022.
The Bole version will increase the thrust to £4 million each, and the SLS will be pushed up to nearly £10 million on the Artemis IX.
But while the Trump administration’s proposed NASA budget wants to kill the use of SLS rockets after Artemis III, Congress is the ultimate funded decision maker.
So, until directed, the contractor will continue to work on future versions of SLS. Artemis’ Northrop Grumman solid rocket booster is an enhanced version of a similar booster used during the Space Shuttle program.
Bole Design is a solution for components in production. This update uses a carbon fiber composite case and a different propellant formula among other features.
The goal is to increase booster performance by 10% with boosters used in Artemis I. This corresponds to the ability of the SLS to carry an additional 11,000 pound payload into lunar orbit.
The nozzle problem was reminiscent of another Northrop Grumman booster problem seen in 2024.
That’s when the nozzle pops out of one of the boosters used in Cape Canaveral’s United Launch Alliance Vulcan Certified 2 missions. The incident contributed to the delays in the Space Force and gave ULA OK to fly national security missions.
However, Northrop Grumman officials said ULA and Artemis boosters were not directly related.
“It’s a completely independent product,” said Mark Pond, senior director of Northrop Grumman’s NASA program for propulsion systems, at Artemis II Media Day, held at the Kennedy Space Center last December.
Artemis II is scheduled to be released by April 2026 for what will be the first crew to send four astronauts on a trip around the moon, but will not land.
“From a concern standpoint, we met all the requirements, did all the tests, met all the acceptance tests and delivery requirements, so we’re not worried from the Artemis II perspective,” he said.
