building the most powerful rocket ever there are lots of things to think about.

One of the things that we think about is how do we point this launch vehicle

very, very precisely. In order to do this we have taken the pieces of our control

system that have been flight proven and we are adding a new piece that we

call adaptive augmenting control to help us to do this even more effectively.

When you consider the basic design envelope that you want to fly through,

you really don't see a need for adaptive control. The basic control system can get the job done.

But when you talk about failure scenarios or a stack

up of unknown unknowns, adaptive control can provide a lot more

performance. When NASA develops new technologies for launch vehicles we

need mature this technology through flight testing. What we've done is we've

partnered with other NASA entities in order to test our SLS flight control

system on an F-18 aircraft. The really key capability that the

Armstrong Flight Research Center offered to SLS was the ability to take

the SLS math models, of how it pitches throughout its flight regime, put

those SLS math models on the F-18 and have it act like the SLS in flight.

We were able to fly many SLS scenarios, everything from a nominal vehicle and

a nominal environment, to really challenging scenarios where we would

have sloshing propellant, or we would have a huge wind shear event. We

even simulated things where we would have the core engines actually stick in

one direction and not be able to move them and then the rest of the control

system had the responsibility of compensating for those issues.

As we were in the control room looking at the data coming in from these many

trajectories, we could quickly see that our adaptive control performed just as

expected, increasing the performance of the basic control system. Coming

out of this flight campaign we were able to meet all of our test objectives

multiple times. This is on top of the millions of simulated trajectories that

we've already flown, all leading up to the first unmanned flight test of SLS,

the most powerful rocket ever made. MUSIC