Mars is the mission
A Lockheed Martin executive talks about Houston and the Orion spacecraft.
Lockheed Martin has a long history of assisting NASA with human spaceflight programs. Its legacy parent companies — Lockheed and Martin Marietta — first moved workers to Houston in the 1960s as NASA developed its Manned Spacecraft Center, now known as the Johnson Space Center.
The company has since assisted with the Gemini program, Apollo missions, Skylab space station and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which was the first international human spaceflight. It also helped build the International Space Station. And after decades of space shuttle operations, Lockheed Martin is now the prime contractor tasked with designing, testing and manufacturing the Orion spacecraft.
Mike Hawes, vice president and program manager for Orion at Lockheed Martin, recently spoke with the Chronicle.
Q: How large was Lockheed Martin’s role in the space shuttle?
A: We had a very large part in the joint venture that we formed with Boeing that was United Space Alliance. We really did fly the shuttle, do all the preparations and bring everything together for the actual missions. Another interesting development that we did on the Martin Marietta side was the device called the manned maneuvering unit, which in the early space shuttle was where the astronauts actually flew away from the shuttle cargo bay on their own in their jet pack and did some satellite retrieval missions.
Q: What are some other interesting projects that involved Lockheed Martin?
A: The solar arrays for the International Space Station. Each one, if you take a top half of the array, is 120 feet long. It folds down into a box that’s 15 inches tall. And that’s the way they were flown to space.
Q: What is the Houston office’s role in the Orion spacecraft?
A: The primary role for the Houston office here is to be the program management office for the Lockheed Martin portion of the project. But we also have some very special expertise here in Houston. We have expertise in the life-support systems that keep the crew alive. We have some of our software teams here in Houston. And so while we have folks spread across the country developing different pieces, we have a strong crew here in Houston that does not just program management but also some of the detailed design and engineering.
Q: Orion is being designed to go deeper into space for longer periods of time. What are some of the challenges associated with that?
A: The challenges start from the very core of the spacecraft. Even the structure itself has to be designed to handle all of those forces of flying in deep space. It has to be able to hold pressure for thousands of days, it needs to provide appropriate radiation shielding because now we’re getting farther out than we have been before, and then it needs to provide those fundamental creature comforts, you know, keeping you alive. Those things, to me, you have to build them in at the beginning.
Q: What are the challenges with landing on Mars?
A: We call it entry, descent and landing. That’s NASA geek for getting down to the surface. We land Orion in the ocean on the Earth, and to do that we have a number of parachutes that slow us down. But the Earth’s atmosphere is very thick, so parachutes do that. When you go to the moon, you have no atmosphere. So you don’t use parachutes at all. You use only rocket thrusters. Landing on Mars is actually tough because you have to deal with the atmosphere, but it doesn’t really help you that much. You can use parachutes for a certain period of time, but you also need rocket thrusters. We have assisted on every NASA Mars landing mission to date, and so we have a great heritage that will help us then scale those systems for human missions.
Q: What are the opportunities presented by Orion?
A: It opens up the solar system. We really are talking about now having the fundamental capability to explore the solar system with humans. For Orion specifically, we’re at a point where the design is nearly done. Now we can look at how can we build that spacecraft even more affordably. We’ve already gone through a process that we believe drops the cost of an Orion spacecraft by over 50 percent. So not only does it open up solar system exploration, but it does it in a much more affordable way for all of us. andrea.rumbaugh@ chron.com twitter.com/ andrearumbaugh