Behind our nation’s next-generation spacecraft are hundreds of small businesses all throughout the country.
Spread throughout the country are a veritable battalion of small businesses – over 800 of them! – that are supporting the development of a spacecraft that will take humans deep into space and return them safely to Earth.
Small businesses in 47 states support the prime contractor that is developing the nation’s new spacecraft, Orion. The prime contractor for this multi-purpose crew vehicle is a founding member of the Coalition, Lockheed Martin.
Being a contractor helping to develop our next-generation space vehicles is a two-way street, though—small businesses benefit greatly from being a part of the Orion program, just as much as they benefit the program itself.
Odyssey, a woman-owned small business, has supported the design and development of the vehicle since 2006. Based in Houston, TX, Odyssey has focused on Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC), mission design and vehicle simulation for Orion. They also won Lockheed Martin’s Orion Small Business of the Year Award in 2010.
Odyssey also supports the Orion team through several other areas. Among these are engineering design, development and testing in GNC, additional simulation, flight software development and vehicle systems engineering.
Through their involvement in the Orion program, what has Odyssey gained? The small business has grown and expanded its experience on both spacecraft design and development. They have enhanced their expertise in entry, descent, and landing flight systems and phases. Their work in GNC now includes missions that travel beyond low-Earth orbit and their on-orbit GNC skills have been reinforced. With nearly 50 percent of their employees having supported the program, the scope, skills and range of employees developing and testing flight software has grown. The small business will continue their research and development of technologies and innovations for new spacecraft.
Image credit: NASA
With 400 employees, PaR Systems supported Orion from 2013 to 2014. The business has contributed to the Orion capsule and service module, which will provide support for the crew module through in-space propulsion, water, oxygen, nitrogen, power generation and storage, and thermal control. For both the Orion capsule and service module, PaR’s nondestructive testing (NDT) services completed the final subsystem close-out tube weld x-rays.
PaR’s NDT services also conducted x-ray evaluations of all welds of the Propulsion and Environmental Control and Life Support Systems at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They x-rayed more than 500 production welds and 200 weld process samples!
Additionally, the small business supports Textron, a Lockheed Martin supplier. They evaluated the AVCOAT Heat Shield for the test flight of Orion in 2014, during which the capsule flew into space and returned to the Earth. Furthermore, the small business has collaborated with NASA on a follow-on study which could get digital x-ray inspection approved.
What has this small business gained from being involved in Orion? They used their advanced NDT services testing and process development to support different NASA groups at other NASA locations – Langley, JPL and KSC.
Taking a closer look at these small businesses gives us window into the hard work being done by hundreds of NASA contractors. Spread across a large portion of the country, the many small businesses that support the Orion deep space capsule are helping to provide the nation with a spacecraft for humans to safely travel to multiple deep space destinations and return to the Earth.
Learn more about the Orion capsule at NASA.gov.