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Monday, April 13, 2009


Orion crew vehicle passes major test; shield choice made
NASA's next planned spacecraft - the Orion Crew Vehicle - made major advances over the past two weeks, completing a major test and choosing a key piece for the six-crew capsule, a space agency spokesman said.
Space agency and Navy divers put the capsule through water-recovery tests, and NASA managers selected a protective heat shield material.


Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Ares rocket development. NASA aims to use the Ares I to loft six people to the International Space Station by 2015 and possibly four people to the moon by 2020.
Although Marshall development work is geared mostly to building the Ares I rocket, engineers keep a close eye on all information gleaned from Constellation tests, Dayna Ise, Marshall's lead manager on integrating the Ares upper stage, told The Times.

Orion is part of the Constellation Program that is developing the country's next-generation spacecraft system for human exploration of the moon and further destinations in the solar system. The Orion crew module will launch atop an Ares I rocket.

"All the upcoming tests are important to us. Every piece of data flows back into our design and integration of the Ares stages," Ise said. "Tests that change or improve the design of Orion, and the propulsion systems, can make for changes in" Marshall work later.

The choice of the heat shield was a key progress milestone, said Grey Hautaluoma, an agency spokesman at NASA headquarters in Washington.
NASA chose "Orion thermal-protection materials and decided that the Avcoat used for Apollo would be effective on Orion. Thousands of tests at multiple NASA centers, especially Ames Research Center (near San Francisco), validated the results," Hautaluoma said.

Orion's heat shield will endure the most heat and will erode, or "ablate," moving heat away from the crew module during its descent through the atmosphere.

NASA engineers predict the crew module will encounter temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. On lunar missions, the heat could be up to five times more extreme than for missions returning from the International Space Station, because of its angle of re-entry.

In tests that began last month and should wrap up this week, the divers tested Orion vehicle and crew-recovery procedures that will be used when the six-person capsule splashes down after a mission.

The Post-landing Orion Recovery Tests, what NASA has dubbed PORT tests, began in late March at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, in Bethesda, Md., and more advanced, rougher tests were carried out this week in the Atlantic Ocean off the Kennedy Space Center.

"Early data suggested that the towing models from Carderock were proving accurate in open water, and the vehicle was placed in increasingly rough seas," Hautaluoma said. "It was good to see a spacecraft 'land' in open water again."