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Lockheed team a key player in tests for Orion

By Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 7, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Orion spacecraft

Photo by Lockheed Martin © Special To The Rocky

Orion spacecraft

Engineer Bob Glade holds a remote control in the Space Operations Simulation Center, which researches space shuttle landing and docking.

Photo by Tim Hussin © The Rocky

Engineer Bob Glade holds a remote control in the Space Operations Simulation Center, which researches space shuttle landing and docking.

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When John Stevens drives his white Camry to work here, he mulls over how to send astronauts to the moon in the safest, least costly way.

It's about a 35-minute trip from his home near Larkspur to the Lockheed Martin Space Systems campus in Waterton Canyon. There's plenty of time for Stevens, an astrophysicist, to ponder deep thoughts.

"I think up problems and start solving the problems," said Stevens, director of business development for human spaceflight at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

For example?

"Why do we have to return to Earth between missions to the moon?" asked Stevens. "Why can't we stay on the moon and do more than one mission?"

Heady stuff. It represents just one piece of the work 600 Lockheed Martin engineers and others in the Denver area are performing on NASA's next-generation Orion spacecraft.

Under NASA's timetable - which could change - Orion is scheduled to take astronauts to the International Space Station by 2015.

By 2020, the spacecraft is scheduled to take four astronauts 239,000 miles to the moon. Years later, it would transport humans to Mars and other destinations.

It all means that Denver-area Lockheed Martin employees would have a hand in Orion for many years to come.

Lockheed Martin is in charge of developing and building Orion. Much of the development and engineering work is being conducted at Lockheed Martin's sprawling, 5,500-acre Waterton campus.

Employees at the campus, for example, are performing thousands of tests to ensure that the computer software and hardware that will be used to fly Orion work smoothly.

"We test like we're going to fly the vehicle," said Tho Nguyen, manager of the company's exploration and development labs at Waterton and in Houston.

On a recent afternoon, Tho stood inside a cavernous, 1,600- square-foot white room, known as the exploration and development lab. Several racks of computers hummed nearby. They mimicked the brains, or avionics, that will control Orion.

"We took all the computers that would be on the Orion and put them here," said Tho, motioning to the computers.

Nearby, about a half-dozen engineers sat behind desktop computers performing the test work.

Their mission: analyze how the hardware and the software interact and work together.

They want to see how the system processes and receives flight data, including speed and vehicle temperature as well as orders from NASA ground controllers. And they want to know if the avionics system will, for example, fire Orion's engines.

"We test the bejesus out of this to find out what the problems are," said Tho, adding that the process was much like dissecting a frog.

Before it uses Orion to take astronauts to the moon, NASA plans to use the spacecraft as a replacement for the space shuttle - after that vehicle is retired in 2010. Orion would, for example, take gear and astronauts to the International Space Station.

Orion is scheduled to fly by the spring of 2015, though technical and financial issues have raised questions about that timetable.

A 117-page NASA report, leaked last month to the NASA Watch Web site, showed an $80 million cost overrun this year for one motor and a dozen technical problems.

NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration, Doug Cooke, likened the process to "sausage-making" and said the problems raised in the report are typical for such a program at such an early point in time.

"I'm really satisfied with the work that's getting done," he told The Associated Press in July.

In another building on the Waterton campus - the space operations simulation center - four engineers sat behind a bank of computers.

Before them - inside a large, black room - stood two robots about 12 feet tall. They were mounted on movable platforms. The platforms were attached to rails that can move forward, backward and sideways.

The setup is designed to simulate how Orion would rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station and, later, the lander taking astronauts to the moon's surface.

The engineers at the nearby computers tested the hardware and software that control the rendezvous and docking system.

One robot was fitted with the docking mechanism that would go on Orion's nose. The other robot was fitted with a mock-up of the docking unit on the International Space Station orbiting the Earth.

In the case of Orion and the space station, it's about docking the 38,000-pound Orion while it's circling the Earth at about 17,000 miles an hour.

Not a simple task.

"You have to match the velocity of what you're trying to dock to," said John Ringelberg, a senior engineer developing rendezvous and docking systems for Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

For Lockheed Martin, the next big date is November. That's when NASA officials are scheduled to review and approve Orion's so-called preliminary design review. The PDR is meant to ensure that everything is on track and working as planned.

"It's a checkpoint along the design path," said Mark Geyer, NASA's project manager for Orion.

After all that's done, John Stevens - Lockheed's director of business development for human spaceflight - will keep mulling how best to get astronauts to the moon and back.

And, of course, employees here will keep performing tests . . . and more tests. The tests will try to mimic all phases of the Orion flight, from before launch at Florida's Cape Canaveral to its splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

"We will be testing on that for the next four years on a continuous fashion," Stevens said.

Just how many tests?

"It has to be in the thousands," he replied. "It's lots, and lots and lots of tests."

Rendezvouswith space * Mission: To carry astronauts to the moon by 2020 and later to Mars

* Other work: To take astronauts to the International Space station after NASA retires the space shuttle in 2010

* Prime Orion contractor: Lockheed Martin

* Number of local Lockheed Martin employees involved in Orion: About 600

* Total national Orion work force, including subcontractors: About 2,000

Comments

  • August 7, 2008

    7:15 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    CoLoradoCitizen writes:

    As a kid, I found space exploration exciting. Fascinating. As an adult. I find it DISGUSTING. Countless hundreds of billions of dollars our idiot government spends on mindless stupidity. Do You know how many countries DON'T do this? Most of them. Why? Because the money is FAR BETTER SPENT ELSEWHERE. We're not rolling in dough here folks. This is debt. A DISGUSTING amount of debt that has a SIGNIFICANT negative impact on the economy. Sure, it creates jobs. It also creates debt for those making far less than these elite jobs, to pay for them. This economy is in the tank. Severely. It is in-excusable to put billions of dollars into nonsense like this when the money, if there was any, should go to paying down the TREMENDOUS debt this president has incurred on the people of the United States.
    STOP spending money on crap like this when the money is more needed elsewhere.

  • August 7, 2008

    7:58 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    windbourne writes:

    ColoradoCitizen,
    We will ALWAYS have other things to spend money on. That is the nature of our lives. The DOD and NASA created an industry that has meant LOADS of jobs. The sat. industry has meant GPS, telecoms, Digital TV, etc. Now, China, Russia, EU, and America are shooting for the moon. Turns out that there is LOADS of uranium up there. It is not economical to bring back, but what it does mean is that it does make sense to launch sats and missions from the moon with plutonium (via breeder). In addition, you can bet on it that which ever country makes it up there (china or USA), will be building weapons up there. Lasers and railguns will become VERY important. An observatory and laser on the moon means the ability to spot all sats and then take them out.
    Even though I am a big fan of the private companies (esp. spacex), I think that DOD and NASA efforts are needed.

  • August 7, 2008

    12:41 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Bagel writes:

    Far better spent elsewhere? You would do well to look up some of the advances the space program has given us.

    What countries don't operate satellites? They're usually the ones that don't have the capability, monetarily or technologically, to do so. Name one of the world superpowers that has no space presence.

    I'm all for fiscal responsibility but to say that space is worthless is ignorance to the highest degree.

  • August 7, 2008

    12:43 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    ArvadaMiner writes:

    In response to the earlier post about space exploration being a waste of money, I would encourage you to consider how our society has benefited during the last 50 years from the efforts of our space program. Just the amount of thinking and ingenuity that resulted from the race to the moon led to many modern advances that we take for granted today. Velcro, post-it notes, lightweight but strong titanium alloy metals, freeze dried ice cream sandwiches to take backpacking, not to mention the GPS and telecommunications mentioned by the 2nd post. It's pretty amazing what our engineers can devise when working on complex, challenging problems such as putting people on the moon for an extended period of time. Solar panels that are being touted as a way to generate clean electricity have advanced more rapidly because they are necessary to power satellites. Is it a waste of money to challenge creative minds to solve complex problems? Not in my opinion. I'm ready to see what the Lockheed engineers can come up with!