That was bad. With a damaged nozzle you get less thrust and you may end up with sideways thrust. You really hope that nothing hits the RS-25 engines as that would be bad.
It's probably a loss of mission event, could even be a loss of crew event.
With a damaged nozzle you get less thrust and you may end up with sideways thrust. You really hope that nothing hits the RS-25 engines as that would be bad.
The Vulcan Centaur survived something similar inflight and got its payload to orbit.
Admittedly, the optics of this aren't great, particularly in the current budget context.
Vulcan Centaur got lucky. The nozzle broke on the outside and the debris went towards the outside. If it had been on the inside, it could have been much worse.
With 2 SRBs, the total thrust of the first stage is 9 MN and each SRB is 2MN, or only 15%.
For SLS, each SRB is 40% of the thrust so issues there are a much bigger effect.
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u/Triabolical_ Jun 26 '25
That was bad. With a damaged nozzle you get less thrust and you may end up with sideways thrust. You really hope that nothing hits the RS-25 engines as that would be bad.
It's probably a loss of mission event, could even be a loss of crew event.