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NASA awards Orion
to Lockheed Martin
By Matthias Gründer
It was not so much the timing which came as a surprise, as the contractor: despite having originally made plans for another space shuttle-like vehicle, Lockheed Martin has been selected to build a capsule on the lines of Apollo.
On 31 August NASA announced the results of the selection process: Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, Maryland, has been selected as the prime contractor to develop and build the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the planned replacement for the space shuttle. According to present plans, the first manned flight will take place in 2014, with the first moon landing no later than 2020. These missions will serve both scientific and commercial purposes, while NASA is also emphasising its contribution towards the USA's leading role in space research.
Lockheed and a rival consortium including Northrop Grumman and Boeing were invited in July 2005 to submit concepts and feasibility studies for the USA's new manned spacecraft. The only requirements laid down by NASA were that the propulsion system used by the newly developed rockets which will carry the CEV into space should be based on the established and manageable Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), and that for safety and cost reasons future space transport should be split between manned and purely cargo flights. The new heavy-lift platforms were named Ares I and Ares II in the summer of 2006.
Lockheed Martin had originally proposed a reusable orbital glider, whereas it was Boeing which proposed a bell-shaped capsule on the lines of the Apollo model. Not only is the new capsule to be bigger than the almost 40-year-old model, but it will also be equipped with the latest technology and with a removable heat shield for re-entry, so that the entire system will be reusable. The rockets on the other hand are to be developed according to the throw-away principle, and even the moon lander is only expected to be used once.
Although the two candidates appeared to be in a head-to-head race for some time without any clear favourite, gradually the capsule project seemed to gain ground. One factor here was the sad experience of the shuttles, which never attained their promised reliability. Above all, the heat shield, consisting of thousands of individual ceramic tiles, had over the years remained a headache for the engineers, who had never properly got to grips with isolating the external tank for the cryogenic fuel components.
On the other hand, the engineers have now been forced to accept a very tight schedule: in only four years' time, four years before the planned maiden flight of Orion, the three surviving space shuttles will finally be parked in museums. During the intervening period the USA will have no manned access to space of its own and will depend on the Russians to fly their astronauts to the ISS. Under these conditions, a capsule is the most likely solution to be delivered on time, as the technology for this has been around since the late 1960s.
The decision to build a capsule is actually less surprising than the fact that the contract was awarded not to Boeing, as expected, but to its arch-rival. Whereas it is generally assumed that Boeing will win the contract to develop the Ares rockets as compensation, Lockheed has already announced that suppliers from the entire country will be involved in building the components. However, most of the work will be performed by NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where 1,200 engineers are to be based, while the large structures will be built at the Michoud Assembly Facility, near New Orleans. Final assembly will then take place at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Florida government has already agreed to provide $45.5 million for the training of specialist personnel and construction of the required infrastructure.
The somewhat detailed contract for the initial part of the project, whose total worth is $3.9 billion, envisages a second stage under which additional Orion spacecraft could be supplied, if required. Just how many are built in the end cannot be foreseen at present, but a further $3.5 billion of financial assistance has been earmarked for the period to September 2019.
Meanwhile Boeing is not the only company to have lost out on the lucrative contracts, as nowhere in the plans is there any mention of the “international co-operation” which had applied to the International Space Station programme. The European, Japanese and of course the Russian space industries will not be involved at any stage of the development and production of components, so that it is likely to be very difficult later on to get any non-US crew onto the space flights. It is in fact almost logical that the other industrial nations should have to look around for their own resources and opportunities for manned space flight.
But whether the first flight of the manned Orion will actually take place in 2014 remains to be seen. According to current assumptions, the development period will run to September 2009 and only then will any specific contracts to build the spacecraft be placed. But if experiences on previous big NASA projects are anything to go by, testing is likely to stretch out over a much longer period than envisaged in the present ambitious plans. Moreover, there is nothing more damaging to success than time pressure imposed by the politicians, who are not yet able today to guarantee that the project will be funded through to its conclusion.
Two test flights of the Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) Ares I are also expected to be carried out in 2009, with fully functional upper stage and dummy unit to simulate the Orion payload. The first orbital flight is planned for mid-2012. The launch vehicles will be transported to the launch pad by one of the crawlers which once carried Saturn V and were later modified for the space shuttles. They are now expected to undergo further modification.
Meanwhile the Orion programme managers at NASA and Lockheed are already at this early stage of the project predicting a failure rate of 1:2000, compared with 1:200 on the shuttles, even though the shuttle programme never achieved even this more modest failure level. Two total losses out of 134 missions hang like the sword of Damocles over all the participants. But whereas the space shuttles did not have any escape equipment on board, Orion, like Apollo in its day, will be equipped with a launch abort system (LAS) that will allow the astronaut crew to make a safe escape in the event of an emergency. The LAS is required to carry the capsule containing the crew out of the danger zone in the event of an emergency, and will be tested late in 2008 in White Sands and in 2009 at Cape Canaveral. One cannot but hope that the ambitious plans will really add up.
From FLUG REVUE 11/2006
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