NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center will provide propulsion system acceptance testing for the Taurus II space launch vehicle, which Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, is developing.

The first Taurus II mission will be flown in support of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services cargo demonstration to the International Space Station (ISS). The demonstration currently is planned for the end of 2010 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia.

Orbital's Taurus II design uses a pair of Aerojet AJ26 rocket engines to provide first stage propulsion for the new launch vehicle. Orbital anticipates the first engine will be delivered to Stennis in mid-2009. Stennis engineers will have less than one year both to design and make modifications to the E-1 Test Stand to accommodate testing of the engine. The engine uses RP-1 hydrocarbon fuel, basically refined rocket-grade kerosene, as rocket propellant. This type of rocket fuel has not been used at Stennis to test a rocket engine this powerful since the late 1960s. Testing the engine will require two phases of work. The initial phase will ensure the facility is meeting its designed requirements. Engineers then will test the engine to determine whether it meets the contractor's requirements. This second phase, the acceptance test, will take place in late summer 2009.

"When Stennis Space Center develops this capability, it will make Stennis' test expertise available to a whole new line of rocket engine developers in both the commercial and government space launch arena,"said Robert Bruce, Stennis' AJ26 test project manager. "We are renewing a capability that the center had when it first opened, giving Stennis the ability to test hydrocarbon fuel for the first time at the E-1 Test Stand. This fuel was used in the 1960s, when Stennis conducted tests for the Saturn V rocket. We have only tested with RP-1 in two much smaller tests since that time."

(Images: Top—Taurus II launch vehicle, artistic rendition, courtesy of Orbital Sciences. Above— the test firing of a Space Shuttle main engine in the A-2 TEst Stand at Stennis Space Center. Image courtesy: NASA.)



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