NASA has made plenty of rockets, but it’s not everyday that you see rocket sleds. This is their latest. It’s not custom made for Santa to deliver presents this December, but instead, it’s designed to replicate “the forces a supersonic spacecraft would experience prior to landing.”
The idea is that it can be used to test inflatable and parachute decelerators. Researchers will then be able to “increase landed payload masses, improve landing accuracy and increase the altitude of safe landing-sites” prior to landing on other planets. This is all about valuable data, even if it is super fun to play with rocket sleds.
It looks like a lot of fun. To bad NASA doesn’t have an amusement park full of these kinds of things. Of course we would all have to be Astronauts to to take part in the fun.
Source Gizmodo