NASA progressing towards first launch of Orion spacecraft

Recent engineering advan ces by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its industry partners across the country show important progress towards Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), the next step to launching humans to deep space. The uncrewed EFT-1 mission, to be launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2014, will test the re-entry performance of the agency’s Orion capsule, the most advanced spacecraft ever designed, which will carry astronauts farther into space than ever before.

“These recent milestones are laying the foundation for our first flight test of Orion in 2014,” said Dan Dumbacher, Deputy Associate Administrator for exploration systems development at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

A tool that will allow the titanium skeleton of the Orion heat shield to be bolted to its carbon fibre skin is at the Denver facility of the spacecraft’s prime contractor Lockheed Martin. This will enable workers to begin assembling the two pieces of the heat shield. Almost 3,000 bolts are needed to hold the skeleton to the skin. A special stand was built to align the skin on the skeleton as holes for the bolts are drilled. Work to bolt the skeleton to the skin will be completed in January. The heat shield then will be shipped to Textron Defense Systems near Boston where the final layer, an ablative material very similar to that used on the Apollo spacecraft, will be added. The completed heat shield is scheduled to be ready for installation onto the Orion crew module at Kennedy next summer.