NASA broke
ground Wednesday on a new launch pad that will host the first escape system
tests for the agency’s Orion capsule, the successor to the U.S. space
shuttle.
Based at
the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the new pad will
host a series of tests for Orion’s launch abort system - a rocket-powered
escape tower designed to wrench a crewed capsule free from its Ares I booster
in an emergency. The first test, Pad Abort-1, is set for Sept. 23, 2008.
“The
launch abort system actually has to operate in a wide variety of different
environmental conditions,” said Mark Kirasich, NASA’s deputy
manager for the Orion project, in a recent briefing. “It has to be able
to pull the crew away for us while we’re sitting on the pad, essentially
from a zero start, and through powered, first-stage flight, and up to very high
altitude.”
The Orion
spacecraft and their Ares I rockets are slated to begin the first crewed
test flights as early as September 2013, about three years after the final
planned flight of NASA’s space shuttles.
“The
flight tests are when we actually start putting the pieces together that get
people into space,” said Mark Geyer, NASA’s deputy manager of the
Constellation program overseeing Orion and Ares.
NASA plans
to retire its three-shuttle fleet, which has been in operation
since 1981, in September 2010 after completing construction of the
International Space Station (ISS). The agency will then rely on its Orion
capsules, their Ares I boosters and a new heavy-lift Ares V launcher to send
astronauts and cargo to the ISS and, ultimately, the moon.
But first,
the agency plans to launch an ambitious series of at least 10 test flights,
five of them from the new White Sands site, to qualify the Orion-Ares I system
for the first planned operational mission to the ISS in September 2014.
“As
long as things go relatively well, we can make it,” Geyer said of the
tightly packed test schedule. “If we do find something that we need to
step back and look carefully on, we will move the launch date, and the launch
dates of the subsequent [tests], to make sure that these vehicles are safe to
fly.”
Abort
tests on tap
The Orion
launch abort system consists of a mast-like tower that carries a set of three
rocket motors, the largest of which is reserved for emergencies to separate an Orion
capsule from its rocket and pull its astronaut to safety. The two smaller
motors are designed to jettison the escape tower after a successful liftoff and
aid in attitude control, Kirasich said.
In addition
to a pair of pad abort tests, which test Orion’s ability to pull its crew
capsule to safety from the launch pad, a trio of in-flight trials is scheduled
between 2009 and 2011 to measure the escape system’s effectiveness at
subsonic and supersonic speeds, as well as during a tumbling motion. A high-altitude
test during the second Ares I launch, slated to fly in 2012 from NASA’s
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., will check the escape system at
the upper limit of its design, the space agency said.
Kirasich
said one of the major challenges his team has tackled has been culling about
5,000 pounds (2,267 kilograms) from the Orion spacecraft to lighten its load.
Meanwhile, a series of other technology checks are underway to test Orion
parachutes and the shuttle-derived solid rocket booster of Ares I’s first
stage.
At the
Kennedy Space Center, work crews are driving in the piles to build lighting
protection system towers around Launch Pad 39B, the staging ground for future
Ares rocket launches, NASA officials said.
Some
preliminary construction was also necessary at White Sands to prepare for
today’s ground breaking, Kirasich said.
“We
actually had some power lines and telephone lines running right across the area
where we’re going to put the launch pad,” he said. “So we had
to take all that down.”
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