NASA Orion Spaceship Blog

Last week, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD), Scott Horowitz, sat down with reporters to discuss the Ares 1 and Orion programs. The impetus for this briefing, according to Horowitz, were recent stories - of varying accuracy - regarding weight and performance issues.  Read more

Jackson, a NASA senior research engineer, has studied materials, structural designs that can better absorb energy, and crash simulations for 25 years — first for the Army and now for NASA. She works at what is now the Landing Impact Research at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.Recently she shared some of what she has learned when the NASA TV education channel broadcast “Crash Safety: Past Success and Future Concepts,” one in a series of Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) technical seminars.

“I work at a very unique facility at NASA Langley,” said Jackson. “It’s a steel A-frame gantry that’s about 240 feet high, 400 feet long and 265 feet wide at the base.”

The gantry, which looks a lot like a huge red and white erector set, started out its life in the early 1960s as the place where Neil Armstrong and 23 other astronauts learned to land on the moon.  Read more

A new NASA presentation has revealed a fascinating insight into Constellation’s evaluations of the Launch Abort System (LAS) that will be used to save the crew of Orion, in the event of a serious failure of the Ares I launch vehicle.With alternative concepts, including a hand drawn Service Module Abort Motor concept by NASA head Mike Griffin, the presentation gives the most comprehensive overview of the system to date, including the option of using the LAS on every flight to assist the vehicle’s performance on ascent.  Read more

A new race for the moon is underway, with countries around the globe preparing to return man to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.India, the US, China, Russia, and even the UK are developing and finessing programmes for a moon landing. Many of these plans are in the early stages, but in its report ‘2006 Space Year in Review’ Ascend, the world’s leading provider of information and consultancy to the global aerospace industry, shows the race is clearly hotting up.

The UK is considering joining NASA’s current space exploration programme, Project Constellation on a bilateral basis. In 2006, NASA chose the Crew Exploration Vehicle for Project Constellation, selecting a design by Lockheed Martin. With a capsule design resembling the Apollo spacecraft, the craft, called the Orion, is a significant move for NASA away from shuttle-like vehicles.  Read more

Cape Canaveral, Fla. - NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will host a ceremony at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 30 to commemorate the transition of the historic Operations and Checkout Building high bay for use by the Constellation Program. Originally built to process space vehicles in the Apollo era, the building will serve as the final assembly facility for the Orion crew exploration vehicle.  Read more

This week NASA is to hold an industry day and interviews for potential Ares I upper-stage constructors.

The first design analysis cycle (DAC-1) was completed last month with key changes to the booster that will launch its Orion crew exploration vehicle, and which consists of a solid rocket booster (SRB) first stage and cryogenic upper stage.  Read more

NASA has renewed its commitment to build spaceship and rocket components in New Orleans. The nation’s space agency has not given up on its Michoud Assembly Facility on the city’s east side, and in fact sees it as an opportunity to help the city recover from Hurricane Katrina.  Read more

NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration calls for robots and humans to return to the moon, Mars and beyond. And NASA Ames’ innovative partnerships with industry and academia will ensure cost-effective development of the breakthrough technologies needed. Responding to a call from the NASA Headquarters’ Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP), Ames and its collaborators recently submitted eight proposals for seed fund consideration. On the basis of technical merit, feasibility and leveraging of internal and external resources, Ames’ proposals were selected for award in four technically diverse areas encompassing the Science, Exploration Systems, Space Operations and Aeronautics mission directorates.  Read more

The NASA press conference last month on lunar exploration was in reality the announcement of a single major program decision, along with a list of categories of reasons for the lunar program itself, and a set of slides showing a sample of results from background concept studies which have been underway for over two years. In addition, the possible large role of other nations in lunar missions was more clearly addressed. The main decision announced was to not begin human lunar flights with a series of “sortie missions” to different lunar sites, but instead to first pick a primary base site (probably at one of the lunar poles), and then proceed to send all manned and cargo flights to that single location with the intention of building up an initial lunar base. This decision does not, though, rule out sortie missions later on after the base has been established.  Read more