NASA’S MARS MISSION GETS A HOUSTON BOOST
Johnson Space Center testing whether astronauts could escape spacecraft if rocket explodes
The conical, 11-foottall space capsule housed in a vast warehouse at NASA’s Johnson Space Center lacks seats, oxygen systems and parachutes.
It can’t support human life while shooting through the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour.
But it doesn’t need to. A year from now, NASA officials based here will see whether this simplified version of the Orion, the spacecraft meant to take humans to Mars, will separate from a booster rocket in half a second at 31,000 feet. If it can, Orion’s eventual crew of four astronauts could escape if the rocket explodes.
“This is a really exciting time to be on the NASA team,” astronaut Nicole Mann said at a Thursday news conference at JSC. “I’m sure you can sense the excitement; we are sending humans further into deep space than we have ever done before … this is a really exciting idea for America and all of the world.”
Work on Orion’s
launch abort system is just one of numerous ways the Houston center is helping America in its quest for deep space exploration.
And that work is ramping up as NASA, with the support of President Donald Trump, pushes toward its goal of sending astronauts around the moon by 2023 and in the vicinity of Mars by the 2030s.
“Space travel is risky, but we want to make it as safe as we can,” Jon Olansen, ascent abort-2 crew module project manager, said in an interview. “We’re doing the best we can to demonstrate that we have a system that will protect the crew in case of emergency.”
What is Orion?
The Orion capsule was part of NASA’s Constellation Program, a brainchild of the George W. Bush administration to send astronauts back to the moon as a stepping stone for Mars.
But in 2010, President Barack Obama ended the program as too costly and inefficient but ultimately spared Orion as a next generation capsule for Mars missions.
The Obama administration then added the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, to send Orion to space. Obama aimed to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, and then near Mars by the 2030s.
But since Trump took office, there’s been a shift back toward Bush’s initial vision.
His $19.9 billion proposed budget for the next fiscal year tasks NASA with launching an uncrewed Orion flight by 2021, following by a launch of Americans around the moon in 2023.
“We believe there’s a lot we need to test and learn from the moon before we move onto Mars,” said Ellen Ochoa, the Johnson Space Center’s director.
NASA officials hope to launch the uncrewed flight in December 2019, but that will likely slip to June 2020 in part because of construction delays with the SLS rocket. There also are issues with the platform that will launch the SLS into orbit. The tower, called the Mobile Launcher, is now actually leaning to one side, although NASA has said it is structurally sound and does not need emergency corrective action.
But first, the emergency systems will be tested. And that's where Johnson comes in.
Three minutes
The April 2019 test of Orion’s launch abort system will last just three minutes, but officials say it will be among the most important three minutes in the buildup to human launch in the 2020s.
The half-second separation of capsule from rocket at 31,000 feet is important in case the rocket explodes and the crews needs to escape to safety, Olansen added.
This test “is one of Orion’s prime safety features,” said Annette Hasbrook, assistant manager for the Orion spacecraft, at the Thursday event.
The test will take place after launch in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Johnson personnel will spend the next year outfitting the capsule with the minimum systems needed for a successful test, such as flight computers and communication systems. It also will include about 800 data sensors.
Because the capsule will lack many systems and objects the real Orion will have when it launches humans, Johnson per- sonnel must make sure the capsule has the same mass distribution as the real Orion. When completed, Orion will weigh about 22,000 pounds.
About 220 personnel work on this simplified capsule. Additional capsules for the unmanned and crewed missions are under construction. The SLS rocket, as well as the ground systems for launch, are being developed simultaneously.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office in October raised concerns over this simultaneous approach because it means that the people responsible for monitoring safety concerns also are responsible for keeping the projects on schedule and budget.
They could be less likely to flag risks that cost time and/or money because they’re “grading their own homework” — an ap- proach that was part of the “broken safety culture” that investigators found contributed to the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster that killed all seven crew members, the report continued. The GAO report quotes NASA officials as saying their work keeping Orion on budget while developing its safety systems was working well because they had the right people capable of considering different safety options.
Plenty of design work
Meanwhile, Johnson personnel also are designing Orion’s cockpit and flight software, spacesuits and parachutes. Johnson is home to the nation’s astronaut corps, where human space flight research and training take place. It is also home to the international space station mission operations and the Orion program.
“Here at JSC, we’re really in the thick of things,” Ochoa said.
Johnson received the simplified capsule last month from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., where personnel built, weighed and balanced it.
NASA will not reuse this crew module once the test is complete, letting it fall back to Earth and sink to the bottom of the ocean where it will likely become a reef, Olansen said.
That, or Jeff Bezos — or someone like him — will pull it out of the ocean. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, mounted an expedition in 2013 in which he fished major components of Apollo 11’s F-1 rocket engine off the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, according to a new book by Christian Davenport, “The Space Barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos.”