Vice President Mike Pence stops in Bldg. 4619 to take a group selfie with members of the SLS team, using Systems Engineer Heather Haney’s phone. Photo courtesy Heather Haney/NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center
HUNTSVILLE – Both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence decided to swing through Alabama to stump for Luther Strange ahead of Tuesday’s special Senate election. On Monday, Pence flew into Redstone Arsenal on his way to a rally in Birmingham.
The vice president had good reason to drop by Rocket City: over the summer Trump revived the National Space Council, which had been disbanded in 1993 under the Clinton administration, and named Pence to head it up.
According to NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center Public Affairs Specialist Tracy McMahan, “He wanted to see some of the hardware, especially for two of our human spaceflight programs: the Space Launch System (SLS) and the International Space Station (ISS). And he’s also going over to Redstone Arsenal, to see some of their hardware.”
In the International Space Station’s Payload Operations and Integration Center, Pence received a briefing on ISS activities at Marshall Space Flight Center, and got to speak directly to astronauts aboard the station, telling them, “Literally and figuratively, we all look up to you!”
At Marshall’s historic Bldg. 4619, a test facility dating back to the days of the Apollo moon missions and Saturn V rocket, Pence got up close with the Space Launch System (SLS) and its Core Stage Engine Section Test Article that just began testing that NASA hopes will help prove that the SLS is a sturdy enough platform to carry astronauts beyond the moon and on to Mars. (See The Tribune’s previous story www.cullmantribune.com/articles/2017/05/25/redstone-arsenal-and-nasa-welcome-first-major-piece-space-exploration-hardware.)
McMahan noted that testing began recently, and should conclude in December. She explained, “They’ll take the data that they get from the tests and compare it to computer models, to say, ‘Yes, this design’s good.’ So this test really validates that design.”
The SLS is scheduled to make an unmanned, remotely-controlled test flight 40,000 miles beyond the moon (farther than any vehicle intended for human transport has ever traveled) in 2019, and its first manned flight in 2022.
Before leaving Redstone Arsenal, Pence also visited the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center, where he received a more private briefing on the Army’s current missile defense projects.
SLS Program Manager John Honeycutt said of the day’s events, “Oh, it’s exciting! You know, the Space Council stood up again; vice presidents chaired the Space Council. (It’s) unbelievable that he took time to come here and see the progress we’re making on the SLS . . . I think he was very impressed; he was awe-inspired. He said, ‘This is amazing; you guys are doing good work.’”
Marshall has many ongoing projects that support the jobs of more than 17,000 north Alabama residents, and contributes more than $70 million to the region through state and local taxes.
Of the SLS project itself, NASA’s press materials state: “The economic impacts of SLS are heavily concentrated in Alabama. The SLS program supports 13,000 jobs and approximately $55 million in state and local taxes annually. Additionally, a large segment of SLS contracts, nearly $950 million worth, are sourced in Alabama. The total economic impact of SLS in the state of Alabama is $2.1 billion.”
Watch for more as The Tribune follows NASA’s SLS project at Redstone Arsenal. For more information on the SLS project, visit www.nasa.gov/content/j2m-getting-to-mars-sls-and-orion.
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