NASA and its industry partners are preparing for next year’s Artemis III demonstration mission by completing new wind tunnel tests on SpaceX’s Super Heavy Version 3 rocket booster. The tests, conducted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, focused on better understanding the extreme aerodynamic forces the rocket can experience during re-entry. The recent test series builds on previous testing completed at NASA Ames in 2024.
NASA is working with SpaceX to develop the company’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to safely carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface and back. The upgraded Super Heavy rocket booster is part of SpaceX’s Starship launch system. Version 3 of Starship and Super Heavy is expected to be the basis for the Starship HLS for Artemis III in 2027 and a later crewed lunar landing in 2028.
Although Starship HLS is a lunar lander designed and built by SpaceX, NASA collaborates with commercial companies to provide access to specialized testing facilities, like the wind tunnels at NASA Ames, and technical expertise, such as the team that set up the wind tunnel testing and helped analyze the results.
“NASA has a lot of experience with unsteady aerodynamics,” said Manish Mehta, discipline lead engineer for the HLS Plume and Aero Environments team, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “We used the agency’s broad experience base of conducting wind tunnel tests for the space shuttle, the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, and Orion spacecraft to efficiently set up and analyze the wind tunnel testing for the Super Heavy Version 3. In fact, similar testing at the Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel resulted in adding strakes to SLS for Artemis II, so what we learned for Artemis II is helping us get to Artemis III and beyond.”
