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America’s Next Spaceship

July 29th, 2014
Astronauts in Orion’s cockpit will monitor its systems through touch screens and fly with a hand controller.

Astronauts in Orion’s cockpit will monitor its systems through touch screens and fly with a hand controller.

“This is all the space for you and your three closest friends,” says Brad Holcomb, a project manager at Lockheed Martin’s Exploration Development Laboratory in Houston, as I settle into the commander’s seat on the low-fidelity mockup of the Orion capsule. Having clambered my six-foot-three-inch frame down through the hatch opening (an isosceles trapezoid, with black-and-yellow caution tape along the top so visitors don’t smack their heads), grabbed a handy yellow strap as I reclined, and swung my legs into a flexed, upright position, I couldn’t imagine working, or driving anything. However normal this position may seem in space, here it felt unsettling. Holcomb is in the same position in a seat a few feet away. Speaking with him—the first interview I have ever conducted on my back—I cannot shake the feeling you get when you climb into a new car with a salesman: resting your hands on the wheel, puzzling out the unfamiliar dashboard, shifting your lumbar region against leather. In this case, however, the seats are severely unaccommodating machined aluminum (the operational version will be upholstered); the windows, shaped roughly like a pair of Aviator shades turned upside down, are above my head; and do not go looking for any cup-holders—though there are other nifty features, like space-saving foldaway seats. While not what you would call expansive, Orion is roomier than the three-astronaut Apollo command modules were. Like a third row seat added to a minivan, the extra 135 cubic feet of habitable volume in Orion is enough to carry a fourth astronaut. In this “mid-fidelity” mockup, the interior is white and spare, and rather than a complicated instrument panel with a hundred switches poking out of it, the cockpit will feature three touchscreens, placed at eye level.

Orion spent years in a high-flying theoretical orbit, and has so far survived the punishing turbulence of reentry into fiscal realities and shifting political desires. In 2006, NASA awarded Lockheed Martin Space Systems $6.1 billion to build spacecraft for the far-ranging Constellation program of human exploration. After the program’s cancellation, Lockheed Martin began work on a contract, extended to 2020, to build spacecraft for three missions. The first flightworthy capsule is being readied (in June, technicians at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center mated the crew and service modules) for its uncrewed 3,600-mile ride this December, after its launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. Orion is the heart of NASA’s most ambitious crewed vehicle ever, a vessel that will carry the human space program for the next 30 years and could see everything from lunar exploration to a variety of still-unfolding asteroid recovery missions to, eventually, it is hoped, a mission to Mars.

Not that astronauts would be expected to log that flight in the Orion command module; for a Mars voyage, a larger habitation module would be attached. There is even talk of having habitation modules stocked with supplies and waiting in space at crucial junctures, like highway rest stops.

Car metaphors may be trite, but while I walk around Lockheed’s laboratory, in a sprawling office park not far from the Johnson Space Center, they keep coming up. (And after all, Lockheed designers did get advice on the capsule’s seat-restraint systems from seat designers for NASCAR.) To explain the difference between a spacecraft designed for a Mars mission and one for low Earth orbit, for example, Linda Singleton, Lockheed’s Orion program integration manager, reaches for the RV comparison: “If you have a car and an RV, you’re not going to run to the grocery store in your RV to get milk,” she says. By contrast, sleeping in the “car” might be acceptable for a one-week jaunt to the moon, but for a nine-month Martian road trip you will want some of the creature comforts of a Winnebago (i.e., a habitation module). Of the spacecraft being developed by companies NASA has hired to ferry people and things to the International Space Station, she says “we kind of call them taxis.” As opposed to the 20,000-mph, 4,000-degree, 12-G reentry that Orion will eventually experience from a deep space jaunt, “the low Earth orbit is a Sunday drive,” Holcomb notes. As we walk around the capsule exterior, I point out to the Lockheed team that, as with the anthropomorphic headlights and grills of most car designs, the front of Orion has a “face.” Purely unintentional, they tell me. Squint a bit and you almost see a less-threatening version of a stormtrooper helmet from Star Wars.

The last time humans left Earth orbit, cars ran on leaded gas, few models had power steering, in-car entertainment was an AM radio, cruise control was a novelty, and air bags were unheard of. So how has something as representative of the Space Age as a space capsule changed in that time? As NASA prepares to launch a vehicle that someday, according to the agency’s “road map,” will go farther into space than any before it, I wanted to look under the hood of this new-model capsule and understand how the agency has designed for distance.

To continue reading: http://www.airspacemag.com/space/americas-next-spaceship-180952126/?all

Original article – Tom Vanderbilt (Air & Space Magazine)

 

Photo credit: DISTI

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