IT’S not every day you get to step inside a spaceship. What struck me most about NASA’s new craft, Orion, is that I could actually stand up in it. The first vehicle in four decades designed to take people to the moon, it is a world away from the cramped Apollo capsules of old.
And this one is just a mock-up. With eight years to go before a crew of six is scheduled to blast off – first to the International Space Station (ISS), and five years later to the moon – the real thing is likely to be a little different. I’m told it will boast sleek, comfortable seats which fold away to give the crew room to move and flat-panel touch-screen displays modelled on the cockpit instruments of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner. That’s quite a contrast to the sea of switches and dials that typified Orion’s predecessors.
It’ll be a tighter fit than the space shuttle’s cabin, but Orion was never about luxury living. The goal is to fly crews to the ISS and to the moon safely, reliably and as cheaply as possible. Follow-up versions could one day ferry astronauts to Mars or nearby asteroids.
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Orion – also called the Crew Exploration Vehicle by NASA insiders – is the long-overdue injection of new blood into NASA’s ageing space fleet. It has been 26 years since the launch of the first space shuttle and the human space programme has been trapped in low-Earth orbit ever since. Sure, there were daring satellite rescues and upgrades to the beloved Hubble Space Telescope. But there have also been two fatal shuttle accidents, both of which were subsequently deemed avoidable by panels of external experts.
It took the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003 to put an end to NASA’s hopes of extending the shuttles’ lifespan and get them behind the idea of brand new rockets and spaceships. It now plans to retire the shuttle Atlantis in 2008, and the final shuttle flight will touch down in 2010. The fleet’s twilight years will be taken up with an intensive, and expensive, effort to build the final third of the space station – no small task, given it took nine years to get the first half up there.
NASA has purchased almost everything it needs to fly the shuttles’ remaining flights, and the manufacturing lines are beginning to shut down. Once this has happened it will be as expensive and time-consuming to resurrect the programme as it would be to continue along the newly chosen path toward Orion, the moon and beyond. NASA is nearly “past the point of no return”, says Bill Gerstenmaier, the agency’s associate administrator for space flight. By the time next year’s presidential election rolls around it will be too late, and too expensive, to turn back.
NASA admits that Orion is in some ways a step back in time – an attempt to pick up where Apollo left off. “We could have already built up an early lunar outpost, or smaller ones at different places of interest,” says NASA’s administrator Michael Griffin. “Most of the next 15 years will be spent recreating capabilities we once had, and discarded.”
As versatile as the shuttle is, it has several characteristics which rule it out when it comes to meeting NASA’s new challenges. Firstly, it was designed for low-Earth orbit, not for the long haul to the moon. Secondly, it has a fatal design flaw in the way it is attached to its external booster stack. The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules rode atop their launch rockets so there was no chance that any debris falling from the rockets during lift-off would cause damage to the capsule. What’s more, in the event of a malfunction during launch the whole stack could be jettisoned and the crew craft flown to safety. Not so with the shuttle. It is flung into space piggy-backing on a huge foam-covered fuel tank, which itself nestles between a pair of rocket boosters that cannot be turned off once they are fired up. The shuttle is simply too exposed during launch, as the Columbia accident showed.
The craft disintegrated on re-entry because of damage caused during lift-off, when a piece of insulating foam broke away from its external fuel tank and smashed into the shuttle’s wing, breaching its heat shield.
Orion capsules will face no such dangers as they will be perched on the nose of their rocket. They should also be much less prone to the kind of launch disaster that befell shuttle Challenger in 1986, as the design incorporates an escape system which will fly the capsule to safety in case of a rocket malfunction during lift-off (see “Abort! Abort!”). Orion will be at least 10 times safer than the shuttle, says Scott Horowitz, the former associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, which oversees the new human exploration initiative.
With the Orion capsule and the new Ares rockets that will launch it clearly reminiscent of the Apollo spacecraft – even Griffin likens them to “Apollo on steroids” – it made sense for NASA to hire Apollo-era veterans to serve as technical advisers. “Apollo accomplished its objectives under budget and on time, and that is relatively rare in the space programme,” says Frank Sietzen, a space policy analyst based in Washington DC.
The capsules are being designed to carry six astronauts to the ISS or four to the moon. Apollo spacecraft ferried a crew of three, one of whom had to stay in the command module as it remained in orbit around the moon while the other two dropped to the moon’s surface in a separate lander. Orion is designed to remain unoccupied in lunar orbit for up to six months while all four astronauts get busy on the moon.
Orion’s conical shape is identical to the Apollo capsule, though the 21st-century model will boast more than twice its volume. Sitting inside the full-scale mock-up, it still doesn’t exactly feel spacious – you can move from one end of it to the other in just seven steps. Project managers insist that the capsule will feel roomier in zero gravity, when astronauts can float around and stand on any wall.
Creature comforts
Then there’s the bathroom, which on any spaceship is guaranteed to capture the attention of landlubbers. It will boast a urinal suitable for both men and women and a toilet for faecal matter. Not much to write home about, you might think, but the Apollo crews would have loved it: they had to relieve themselves into bags attached to their bare behinds. Other Orion upgrades include a basic galley, crew quarters and electronic cockpit with touch-screen displays and control panels that can be stowed when not in use.
Getting to the moon requires serious rocket power. For Apollo, NASA created the heavy-lift Saturn 5 rocket, which lofted the entire entourage of capsule, propellant module and lunar surface vehicle in one go. This time NASA is taking a radically different approach that will involve two versions of the Ares rocket making separate launches within hours of each other. The crewed Orion capsule will go into Earth orbit on the second of these. Before that a larger booster will have carried everything else into orbit: the propellant module, called the Earth Departure Stage, which will power the journey from Earth orbit to the moon and back, plus the lunar lander, known as the Lunar Surface Access Module. After docking with its propellent module, the Orion capsule will be able to begin the 385,000-kilometre journey to the moon in earnest (see Diagram). The first lunar flight is scheduled for around 2020 and is expected to cost about $100 billion.
NASA hopes that the new programme will eventually lead to crewed missions beyond the moon, eventually to Mars. The agency is also considering using an Orion spacecraft to help crash Hubble safely into the ocean at the end of its life. “If [Orion] can go to the moon, it can probably take up a solid rocket motor to Hubble,” says Ed Weiler, head of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, which oversees the telescope.
“Orion will fly to the moon, nearby asteroids and eventually to Mars”
Orion’s first missions, beginning around 2015, will be to the ISS. NASA’s contract with Orion’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, envisages it being used to send crews to the space station up until 2020 if needed. By that time, NASA’s recent $500 million investment in start-up commercial launching companies may have paid off. The hope is that one or more of these firms may then be able to take over responsibility for cargo transports to the ISS, and possibly for ferrying crew to and fro.
To help cut costs, Orion capsules are being designed to be used up to 10 times each. Likewise, the shuttle-based boosters on the Ares launchers can be retrieved from the ocean after separation, refurbished and reflown. NASA hopes to skip the expensive water recoveries of the Apollo capsules and have the Orion capsules parachute down on dry land, aided by a combination of steering rockets and airbags. Landings, like launches, will be fully automated. “The state-of-the-art technologies that are required to make this vehicle successful are already here and have been proven on other spacecraft,” says Cleon Lacefield, the Orion project manager at Lockheed Martin. “I think it has an extremely high chance of success.”
Let’s hope so because, with the shuttle fleet retiring, NASA really has no other choice.
Abort! Abort!
Astronauts know to expect a fast and furious trip into orbit, but crew members aboard the new Orion capsules could face a very different ride if things go wrong on the ground in the seconds before blast-off. To give the astronauts and launch pad workers a fighting chance, NASA is planning to install a roller coaster-style escape system that would whisk them to safety at a moment’s notice.
Small rail cars parked near the capsule’s entry hatch, about 110 metres above ground, would take a maximum of 15 people on a near-vertical plunge to the pad’s base, where they could take shelter in a bunker. The journey down would take just 11 seconds.
The Orion capsule itself will have a rocket-powered abort system that can separate the spaceship – with the crew on board – from a stricken launch vehicle and fly it to safety. This launch abort system is designed to pull the crew and capsule off the rocket either on the launch pad or at any point during the climb into orbit.
Russia’s Soyuz rockets have a similar system, and it has proven its worth. In 1983, cosmonauts Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov were awaiting lift-off when a fuel leak triggered a fire and explosion. Their ship was already engulfed in flames when the abort system kicked in, catapulting them to safety.
