NASA just fired an old space shuttle engine at ‘113% thrust’ and plans to use it on a new mega-rocket

NASA fired up a rocket engine pulled from a space shuttle on Wednesday – then cranked the power up to 11.But this hot fire, as such rocket engine tests are known, wasn’t done out of nostalgia for the space shuttle program, which retired in July 2011

NASA’s current rocket of the future is called the Space Launch System. It is a heavy-lift vehicle that replaced a similar program called Constellation proposed by the Bush administration.

SLS is a 321-foot-tall rocket that will outperform the Saturn V rockets that sent Apollo astronauts on the first lunar missions .

For the Feb. 21 test at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, the engines were outfitted with new 3D-printed parts to reach “113 percent thrust level” – 13%

Meanwhile, private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX , Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin , ULA , and others are working on colossal new launch systems that may come close to rivaling SLS. Their launch power may even exceed it, and for far less money .

But rockets are not easy to design, build, and make safe to launch, so the major players are still emerging in what’s quickly becoming a new space race .

beyond what the engines were designed to achieve some 40 years ago.

In addition to these brawny rockets, the space agency has, at different times, toiled on various smaller, futuristic rocket planes such as the X-30 (also known as the National Aerospace Plane) and the X-33.

None of these prior programs, heavy lift or otherwise, got anywhere near liftoff. Their price tags were hefty, and their mission costs would have been even heftier.

NASA is working toward a maiden flight with SLS called “Exploration Mission 1.” The SLS rocket for the mission is designed to haul nearly 29 tons out to the moon,

This is primarily due to the program’s multi-billion-dollar cost and a flat NASA budget, according to a Government Accountability Office report .

It’s not a far-fetched idea. In fact, he makes a compelling case that NASA should get out of the rocket business entirely and let the private sector go to work.

If human space exploration is ever to get beyond occasional, expensive, symbolic and largely uninspiring flights, it won’t be from reinventing the wheel (or the heavy lift rocket). It will be because the costs of launches and space travel are brought down significantly.