At long last, it's happened. NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) is ... in space.

For more than a decade, NASA contractors including Boeing (NYSE: BA), Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), Aerojet Rocketdyne (NYSE: AJRD), and Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) have worked to make NASA's vision of an interplanetary megarocket a reality. They've been working on SLS so long, in fact, that one of these companies had time to change its name twice before the work was done. (Northrop absorbed SLS contractor Orbital ATK back in 2017, not long after Orbital ATK itself merged with Alliant Techsystems.)

Plagued by technical glitches and uncooperative weather, it eventually took SLS three tries, and three months of delays, to launch itself into orbit this year. But it all worked out in the end.

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Source Fool.com