THEY may bring to mind Daleks, the sinister cyborg race from the British TV series Doctor Who, but during their working life they belched fire into the flame trenches at the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, Florida. Now a curious calm has fallen on these formidable beasts - the engines from the recently retired space shuttles Atlantis and Endeavour - as they await a new role in human space flight.
Stored alongside nine others - those from Discovery, plus spares - in the engine shop at Kennedy, these Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne liquid-fuelled motors are awaiting transport to NASA's Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. There, they will be tested and hopefully reused in NASA's future heavy-lifting rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which is designed for missions beyond Earth orbit.
It is all part of NASA's plan of learning as much as possible from the shuttle programme and feeding that knowledge, and technology where possible, into the next generation of "shuttle-derived" rockets. Both variants of the SLS reuse space shuttle main engines - and both could feature shuttle-style solid rocket boosters, although one also has the option of liquid-fuel boosters.
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