Video: Former shuttle engine test-fired

NASA and Boeing have awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne widely-anticipated contracts to restart the production of simplified shuttle-era rocket engines for the heavy-lift Space Launch System and supply the propulsion system for the CST-100 Starliner commercial crew capsule, officials announced this week.

The core piece of NASA’s first huge Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket designed to carry astronauts back to the moon fired its main engines more than eight minutes Thursday in southern Mississippi, acing a crucial test before the it ships to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for liftoff.

If all goes according to plan, engineers in southern Mississippi later this month will load cryogenic propellants into the core stage of a rocket NASA says will launch astronauts back to the moon, exposing its tankage and internal plumbing to extreme operating conditions hundreds of degrees below zero for the first time. The fueling test — a major milestone in its own right — is a precursor to a high-stakes eight-minute test-firing of the Space Launch System’s four shuttle-era main engines planned as soon as November.