Véhicule Orion

Engineers at Johnson Space Center (JSC) have scheduled four days of testing with three different versions of NASA’s planned new spacesuit to begin melding the suit with the Orion crew exploration vehicle that is also under development there.
Astronauts and engineers will don the prototype Constellation suits to compare their utility for a number of tasks in a mockup of the latest configuration of the Orion crew cabin. Scheduled for testing are a prototype built by David Clark Co., Inc., for Oceaneering, the prime contractor for the new spacesuit. A separate suit built by ILC Dover, another Oceaneering subcontractor, also will be tested, as will one built in-house at JSC.
“This is the first test that our prime contractor is leading,” said Nicole Jordan, a Constellation spacesuit engineer at JSC. “We’re putting three suits into the mockup that are close to what we think the new suit is going to look like.”
In the past, test subjects have worn shuttle spacesuits to fit-check the Orion mockups. The two contractor suits will be pressurized for the first time during the tests to give engineers an idea of how they will perform when stiffened by the internal pressure.
The modular Constellation suit consists of a “soft” suit that the crew will wear during launch and reentry and when the cabin is depressurized for whatever reason, including the need to conduct an extravehicular activity (EVA). A second, “hard” element for eventual lunar excursions will mate arms, legs and perhaps the boots and helmets from the “configuration 1” ascent and entry suit with a hard “configuration 2” torso equipped with life support and batteries.
On EVAs conducted from the Orion capsule, the spacewalkers will be tethered with an umbilical that supplies their air and power, much as the first Project Gemini EVA astronauts were. However, Jordan explained that those suits were open-loop, venting the gas into space. The Constellation system will be closed-loop, recycling the gas to permit longer excursions and conserve consumables.
The Orion mockup is relatively hi-fidelity, with four seats that can be adjusted in a fashion expected to be followed in the final version, and the pilots’ controls and displays configured in line with the current design. The test subjects, a mix of NASA astronauts and engineers from the space agency and the contractors, will wear the suits while performing the activities they can be expected to carry out on real missions, including getting in and out of the seats and the hatch. Like the rest of the mockup, the hatch is fairly high-fidelity, with some protruding hinges that crews will have to negotiate.
“One benefit of this test is that we’ll get to see what design features are good or bad,” Jordan said. “I think it gives a good idea of how we want to change our reference, because we have a reference design for the Constellation suit, and I think it will help give us some ideas of things we want to look at going forward.”

Orion Workers Shed, Capsule Redefined

Lockheed Martin is trimming its Orion spacecraft workforce by 20% as it works with NASA to redefine the vehicle as a crew rescue capsule for International Space Station crews.
The cuts amount to 300 Lockheed Martin employees and 300 subcontractor personnel. While the company is working to find new positions for the displaced staff within the company, “layoff notices are probably inevitable, and that will happen shortly,” according to Linda Karanian, Lockheed’s Washington-based director of human space flight programs.
Orion, like the U.S. space program as a whole, remains in limbo following the Obama administration’s announcement that it wants to cancel the George W. Bush administration’s Constellation Moon-Mars program in favor of myriad technology development efforts and human missions to alternate destinations such as asteroids.
Lockheed Martin anticipates little difficulty in transitioning Orion from a full-up spacecraft intended for missions beyond low Earth orbit to a crew rescue vehicle. “Our current Orion requirements as a crew exploration vehicle encompass any requirements we foresee that would be imposed … on a lifeboat,” Karanian says, noting that the company is convinced it can provide a vehicle that would involve only “marginal delta cost” to NASA beyond the current program.
“We’re looking at various things to use—test vehicles, perhaps, that we’re already on contract for,” Karanian says. “When we’ve completed tests, we [could] provide those to NASA to launch to the space station to serve as lifeboats.” If a decision is made quickly, and appropriate funding provided, the company believes it could have an Orion lifeboat ready for launch to the station by 2013.
Both Lockheed Martin and NASA are in the awkward position of still being legally bound to continue developing Orion as a full-up crew exploration vehicle, since NASA’s Fiscal 2010 appropriation bill forbids the agency from canceling any element of Constellation.
And Congress—which has mounted stiff, bipartisan opposition to Obama’s space plan—is watching both customer and contractor carefully. Some Senate lawmakers recently raised alarms when they received word from Orion subcontractor Alliant Techsystems that no more funding would be forthcoming for Orion’s Launch Abort System (LAS)—a costly safety measure that would not be needed on a scaled-back Orion lifeboat. NASA, they assert, is either violating the law or doing whatever it can to circumvent it (Aerospace DAILY, April 23).
Following a successful pad abort test of the LAS system at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., on May 6, Lockheed Martin believes it can legally “pause” work on the LAS “until NASA decides the direction forward, without impacting launch availability,” Karanian says.
The program has passed a number of other recent milestones, including a preliminary design review in August 2009 and a software PDR in April of this year. The program’s critical design review will begin in September and is likely to extend into 2011

Orion Testing Continues At Michoud

The first Orion capsule passed a structural proof pressure test at the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, La., on Aug. 30.
The proof test article will be used for ground and flight evaluations, which will correlate test data with analytical models to validate Orion’s flight design engineering. Tests included pressurizing the spacecraft up to 15.55 lb. per sq. in. (1.05 atmospheres) to check for leaks in the friction-stir welded aluminum-lithium alloy structure.
Prime contractor Lockheed Martin is now outfitting the test unit with its final configuration of interior and exterior mass and volume simulators. The installation includes secondary structure, simulated astronauts, instrumentation, heat shields and other equipment. Around December the Orion will be delivered to the company’s Denver, Colo., facility for performance testing in an acoustic chamber.
The “worst case” testing, conducted with a simulated launch abort system attached to the vehicle, will simulate the response of the structure and internal cabin environment during a simulated abort while the Ares launch vehicle is at maximum dynamic pressure. “This will determine if acoustic energy gets transmitted through the fairing and structure,” says Lockheed Martin Orion deputy program manager Larry Price. Full-up tests in the acoustic chamber are expected to be underway in the March-April 2011 period, he adds.

Orion Will Slow Down For Heavy-lift Launcher

NASA will continue its contract with Lockheed Martin for development of the George W. Bush-era Orion crew exploration vehicle, rechristened the Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) by Congress, but it will stretch out the contract while it figures out how to build a heavy-lift “Space Launch System” (SLS) to carry it beyond low Earth orbit.
The U.S. space agency has spent about $5 billion on Orion since it was started as the shuttle follow-on under the Constellation program. Now that it is being “phased” with the SLS, managers don’t know yet what it will cost to complete the development.
“The cost on it is going to depend on how long it takes to phase out these things, to some degree,” NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration Doug Cooke told reporters May 24 in announcing the decision by Administrator Charles Bolden to continue building Orion under its existing contract.
Lockheed Martin already is ground-testing its first Orion at its Denver facility, and plans to refurbish that article for a later test flight in a schedule that could lead to piloted operations as early as 2016.
However, Cooke says it will be “early summer” before NASA makes its final choice on the SLV design, and that will be the pacing item in building the government-owned transportation system Congress ordered last year to take astronauts into deep space. To begin operations in 2016, Lockheed Martin needs to test its first unoccupied Orion in 2013, and Cooke says NASA has not picked a launch vehicle for that or any subsequent test flights of the capsule-shaped vehicle.
“We basically have to look at it in an integrated approach, along with the launch vehicle development,” he says. “There are spikes in development at times, so you want to try to make those happen at the right times and the most optimum sense, so it might slow things down a little bit on one versus another, depending on how things work out.”
The pace of SLV development will depend on how much heritage hardware is used, he says.
The agency’s tentative design reference mission for the SLV uses space shuttle main engines and other existing components to speed development, and the final design may reuse even more technology, but Bolden has placed himself at loggerheads with Congress by saying NASA can’t meet its 2016 deadline for flying SLS.
The lag will make it even more important for NASA to begin using commercial cargo and crew vehicles to support the International Space Station.
Cooke says Orion will continue to have a “backup” role as station support, but it won’t be the most efficient way to get there when used with the heavy-lifter, even after it is ready to fly.
Cooke says NASA considered using commercial vehicles to get exploration crews to low Earth orbit for transfer to vehicles going deeper into space, and ultimately decided to stay with Orion.
The MPCV contract also will use new approaches to cost-cutting, he says, and make the “most efficient use of the NASA and contractor workforce.”
As envisioned in Bolden’s decision, the Orion-based MPCV will carry four crew for as long as 21 days in 316 cubic ft. of habitable space, using a solid-fuel escape tower to achieve 10 times the safety of the space shuttle.

Next-Generation Space Flight

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The Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), or Orion, being assembled and tested at Lockheed Martin's Vertical Testing Facility in Colorado.

Drawing from more than 50 years of spaceflight research and development, Orion is designed to meet the evolving needs of our nation's space program for decades to come.

As the flagship of our nation's next-generation space fleet, Orion will push the envelope of human spaceflight far beyond low Earth orbit.

Orion may resemble its Apollo-era predecessors, but its technology and capability are light years apart. Orion features dozens of technology advancements and innovations that have been incorporated into the spacecraft's subsystem and component design.

A test version of the Orion spacecraft makes a stop at the Science Museum Oklahoma in Oklahoma City today, giving residents the chance to see a full scale test version of the vehicle that will take humans into deep space.

Testing the Orion Crew Vehicle's Parachutes

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On April 17, 2012, NASA conducted a test of the Orion crew vehicle's entry, descent and landing parachutes high above the Arizona desert in preparation for the vehicle's orbital flight test, Exploration Flight Test-1. The primary objectives were to determine how the entire system would respond if one of the three main parachutes inflated too quickly and to validate the drogue parachute design by testing at a high dynamic pressure that closely mimicked the environments expected for Exploration Flight Test-1.