A giant test fuel tank for NASA’s Space Launch System has been tied up beside the Tennessee River this week waiting to be unloaded, but don’t blame the government shutdown. This one’s on the river.

“The river level’s too high,” NASA contractor Marc Verhage said Friday. Verhage is a former NASA employee who is now a senior vice president with the aerospace engineering company TriVector Services, Inc. The company is handling the tank’s move to a test stand at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Tennessee River is swollen from heavy rains across the South in recent weeks, and crews can’t unload the tank until the water drops where the tank will leave its transport barge. “There’s security and the tug (team) manning it,” Verhage said of the interim.

When the public last saw it, the 149-foot-long tank was being loaded on the barge at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. That was Dec. 14, 2018. It arrived in north Alabama on Dec. 26.

The federal government shut down during the trip on Dec. 22 in a budget dispute between President Trump and Congress. Many NASA staffers are home for the duration, but the space agency planned for that possibility.

Verhage and NASA got the team handling the tank move placed on “the exceptions list” of government and contractor workers allowed to work through the shutdown. “We did all of that ahead of time,” Verhage said. “On project-critical hardware, you have to get it where it’s supposed to be. When the river goes down, we’ll unload it.”

When testing begins at Marshall, the tank will be suspended from the test tower and attached to hydraulic cylinders. NASA says those cylinders will “extend and retract, pushing and pulling in different combinations against the test (tank), the test stand base and towers, applying millions of pounds of pulling and crushing force and up to 340,000 pounds (approximately 1.5 million newtons) of shearing or sideways force." There are more than 30 test scenarios planned.

NASA engineers are confident the tank will pass the tests. That’s what their computer simulations say. But computer simulations aren’t enough when you’re talking about a rocket NASA is counting on to take Americans back to deep space. So the SLS team built and equipped new test stands at Marshall to get the real-life proof.