Orion Pad Abort 1 Launch at White Sands

Pad Abort 1 (PA-1), launched May 6, 2010 from White Sands Missile Range, N.M. PA-1 is the first fully integrated flight test of the launch abort system being developed for the Orion crew exploration vehicle [NASA].

Details via NASA.

Rendezvous Boom Concept

Over at Selenian Boondocks is some good evidence of thinking outside the box. Jonathan Goff and Kurt Sorensen have been discussing the Boom Rendezvous Concept.

"I think the video does a very good job of showing the basic idea," Goff writes. "First here’s an animation of a CEV doing a boom-rendezvous docking with an LSAM/EDS stack," and "another video that shows more about how the Bi-STEM system actually works."

Read the post, watch the videos HERE.

Bigelow makes pitch for 'Orion-lite' CEV

Bigelow Aerospace Orion-Lite - According to reports, officials representing Bigelow Aerospace, with a test inflatible prototype for a proposed low-Earth orbiting hotel in orbit for many months, met privately with members of the Augustine Human Spaceflight Review committee this week, to pitch a cheaper version of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, presumably designed for shorter, low Earth orbiting missions, and without radiation proofing deemed necessary for the redesigned vehicle to travel for long-duration missions, to the Moon and deeper destinations in Space. Bigelow reportedly said their version of Orion could be ready for flight in 2013.

Orion - Next Stop Stennis

Orion CEV Block One Mock-Up arrives in Pensacola, Monday, where it was viewed by enthusiastic crowds at the Naval Air Station museum. Next Stop, on its way to Kennedy Space Center, Stennisphere.

A full-scale mockup of NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle will be on display for free public viewing Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at StenniSphere, the visitor center at NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center.

The mockup is used in tests to study the environment for astronauts and recovery crews after an Orion ocean splashdown. It is being moved from Florida to Texas to continue its testing, but is stopping at Stennis and other locations for public viewing en route.

The first round of Post-landing Orion Recovery Tests (PORT) occurred in March in a controlled water environment at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Md. Additional testing near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in April took place in the rougher, uncontrolled waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The next testing phase, designated as PORT II, will be conducted at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“The first portion of PORT testing was a great success, giving NASA an early look into the motions crews inside and outside Orion will feel after landing,” said Alan Rhodes, PORT testing lead at Johnson. “This will allow us to modify the design to aid in the recovery of the vehicle and crew.”

At Johnson, the PORT test article will be outfitted with seats, restraints and other items that may affect how crews get in and out of Orion. Engineers will evaluate the crew’s ability to get out of Orion in calm water at the Sonny Carter Training Facility’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab. NASA will also work with U.S. Air Force rescue and recovery experts to determine how parajumpers will assist crews in case of an emergency.

NASA’s Constellation Program is developing America’s next-generation human spaceflight system to carry astronauts to the International Space Station, the moon and destinations beyond.

NASA shows future of American Space Travel
Pensacola News Journal

Strange Constellation Stories

Constellation CEV closes in for docking with the orbiting Altair lunar lander, in this early notional view. Precision space vehicles depend on split second timing that makes manned operation more difficult to imagine than operation that is unmanned. Is NASA turning on its own vision to stay ahead of a political parade already on the march?

In the middle of a budget fight and with a new presidential commission (which may or may not have a predetermined agenda), inexplicably, Chris Bergen of NASAspaceflight.com reported, July 4, that "Orion (CEV) is undergoing further reductions in capability, including the elimination of the vehicles unmanned ability."

The cause being inexplicable, the latter capability, to operate robotically, is completely inexplicable. It's simply not believable.

In 1969, putting Apollo's CSM/LM flight system into lunar orbit, for example, required a computer with less sophistication than the chip installed in a cheap coffee maker today, to fire the all-important SPS and RCS rockets with needed precision. The same weight and materials today could carry the "Holodeck" from the Starship Enterprise.

In "Constellation battles numerous top risks - Orion loses unmanned capability," Bergin wrote, "Issues noted in the recent “Top Risks” review list 10 serious issues with the Ares and Orion vehicles, ranging from Ares I-X, through to Orion itself."

"A large amount of uncertainty surrounds the future of the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle, uncertainty that even led to the high ranking MOD (Mission Operations Directorate) director, Paul Hill, to speak only of his confidence that there will at least be a “follow on program” - whatever that may be - after shuttle is retired, during the end of June All Hands address to MOD staff. (Article to be published Sunday)."

"However, it is unlikely any fallout from the Augustine Commission - which Mr Hill was referencing - will result in the Ares I-X test flight being cancelled, as the four segment test vehicle attempts to keep to its mid-September launch date."

See all of NASASpaceflight.com’s Constellation related articles:
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/news/constellation/

Block 1 Orion isn't designed to travel to the Moon, or anywhere else, including ISS. for that matter, so clearly the earliest Ares Orion CEV "Block 1s" are not to be designed to be left parked in a transfer orbit around the Moon, and will thus require the Altair ascent stage to rendezvous its entire mission crew, as advertised.

Though more than one Block 1 Apollo CSM was built, only one was every flown with a manned crew. (Apollo 7's orbital endurance check out in October 1968.) So why all this strange noise about a Orion CEV without unmanned capability?

Because it's impossible to imagine a spacecraft of this sort even being flight-worthy without unmanned capability.

Orion CEV heat shield selected

"As Apollo did, Orion will use an Avcoat heat-shield, which is made of "silica fibers with an epoxy-novalic resin filled in a fiberglass-phenolic
honeycomb."

Bluuue Rajah
sci.space.policy

NASA Selects Material for Orion Spacecraft Heat Shield
Spacefellowship.com

Orion on display in DC

NASA Dryden Flight Research Center escorts NASA's
first Orion full-stage abort flight test module- NASA

NASA showcased the Orion command module, Monday in a day-long public event on the National Mall in Washington. The full-size mockup of the Constellation CEV was parked on the Mall between 4th and 7th Streets, SW, in front of the National Air and Space Museum. Reporters attended a briefing Monday morning.

The spacecraft mockup is on its way from water testing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock Division in Bethesda to open water testing in the Atlantic, off the coast of KSC.

The goal of the operation, dubbed the Post-landing Orion Recovery Test, or PORT, is to determine what kind of motions the astronaut crew can expect after landing, as well as conditions outside for the recovery team.

Orion is targeted to begin carrying humans to ISS no sooner than 2015 and to the moon in 2020.

Report on Orion CEV Tunnel 9 Aeroheating

Experimental Investigation of Project Orion
Crew Exploration Vehicle Aeroheating in
AEDC Tunnel 9

Brian R. Hollis, et. al; (NASA Langley Research Center)

An investigation of the aeroheating environment of the Project Orion Crew Entry Vehicle has been performed in the Arnold Engineering Development Center Tunnel 9. The goals of this test were to measure turbulent heating augmentation levels on the heat shield and to obtain high-fidelity heating data for assessment of computational fluid dynamics methods. Laminar and turbulent predictions were generated for all wind tunnel test conditions and comparisons were performed with the data for the purpose of helping to define uncertainty margins for the computational method. Data from both the wind tunnel test and the computational study are presented herein.

Tech Brief (pdf) Available HERE.

Keeping it Cool: CEV Heat Shield MDU Arrives

Tanya Nguyen, Staff Writer
NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center

NASA is teaming up technology developed for the space shuttle and designs used for the Apollo Program to produce elements of the next spacecraft destined to deliver astronauts to the moon.

An early sign of that combination has made its way to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in the form of a prototype heat shield, which is the same size and dimensions of the one planned to protect the Orion spacecraft as it enters Earth's atmosphere on the way back from the International Space Station or the moon.

The arrival of the heat shield stirred up excitement from workers on the Constellation Program as they were able to see for the first time one of the first pieces of Orion's full-scale test hardware.

"When (it) got here at the end of November, it was very exciting because it is the first piece of hardware," said Joy Huff, a NASA shuttle orbiter thermal protection system engineer who is spearheading Kennedy's work on the Orion heat shield. "Not flight hardware, but it is flight-type material. And just to see the full size, it really gives you a scale of the size of it."

At five meters in diameter, the heat shield is the largest one of its kind ever built. The prototype was built largely just to prove it could be done, Huff said.

Also known as a manufacturing demonstration unit, or MDU, the prototype was also created by the need to develop heat shield evaluation, inspection and handling procedures, said Jim Reuther, project manager of the Crew Exploration Vehicle thermal protection system at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Although parts of Orion's thermal protection system, which serves as a barrier against the heat upon re-entry into Earth, will use shuttle tile materials, the base of the heat shield endures the most heat and will burn away or "ablate" as it descends through the atmosphere at more than 25,000 mph.

The use of ablative materials mirrors that of the Apollo Program's approach, in which the entire entry capsule was covered with an ablator, Reuther said. The Orion heat shield also uses techniques perfected for the shuttle's thermal protection system, particularly the bonding method used to attach the segments of ablative material to the base heat shield. But since the area to be protected is much smaller than that of the shuttle, and because the base of Orion's heat shield will not be reused, its design is simpler in respect to the number of parts and reusability.

The prototype heat shield is made of the leading candidate material called PICA, which stands for phenolic impregnated carbon ablator material. The PICA material was previously used for the base heat shield of Stardust, a small robotic spacecraft that successfully completed its mission of obtaining comet samples and returned to Earth in January 2006.

Because Stardust was less than 3 feet in diameter, it was possible to cast its heat shield in a single piece as opposed to the many pieces needed to make Orion's heat shield. At 16.5 feet in diameter, Orion's heat shield will require up to 200 pieces of PICA blocks.

"The actual final number of PICA blocks will be determined by both manufacturing and thermal-mechanical design constraints,"Reuther said. "However, when compared to the roughly 24,000 tiles used on the shuttle, the final number of blocks will be very manageable."


The blocks on the heat shield share the same delicate characteristics as the shuttle's tiles. Designers also plan to include gap fillers between blocks, just as with the shuttle.

NASA chose an ablative heat shield that slowly burns off because it can handle higher temperatures than the shuttle's reusable tiles. A spacecraft returning from a lunar mission is expected to encounter temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, compared to about 2,300 degrees for a space shuttle re-entry.

Because of this, the Orion heat shield can only be used once, Huff said. The prototype heat shield rests in Hangar N at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station where will it undergo several months of nondestructive evaluation testing, or NDE, that mainly includes laser scans and X-rays. The tests will be used to reveal flaws purposely built into the heat shield.

"We want to get it into the X-ray facility to use X-rays to look for these known flaws," Huff said. "That's part of the NDE task to come up with standards, so when you get a flight unit, you know what you're flying."

But before any NDE testing can be performed, the team at Kennedy has to learn the best way to move and handle the heat shield. Because of the size of the prototype, they also will have to test and develop new handling standards that will be applied to the actual flight heat shields.

Backup procedures call for using a crane to handle the prototype, but Huff said she hopes to see an adaptor made that will allow a forklift to be used instead. The forklift would make it easier to handle the prototype inside buildings and as it undergoes testing procedures.

"The materials (for the adaptor) have been ordered, (so we) should be fabricating (it) within the next few weeks, get that built and then we'll put the MDU on the adaptor and start NDE testing," Huff said.

She's looking forward to a special milestone to take place by late summer: turning all handling and NDE testing results over to Lockheed Martin.

And when that happens, the Constellation Program's mission of putting man on the moon and beyond will be one big step closer.