July 2, 2012 — Without a heat shield or wiring, and with only welded metal panels to see, NASA's new spacecraft designed to take astronauts out beyond Earth and into the solar system doesn't look like much yet.
But to NASA, congressional and space industry leaders, the capsule's olive-green pressure shell is an exciting sight to behold. The capsule, NASA's first space bound Orion crew module, was unveiled on Monday (July 2) to mark its arrival at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the site of the spacecraft's planned 2014 launch on an unmanned test flight.
"Isn't this beautiful," Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) told an audience of more than 450 Orion team members looking at the spacecraft behind him. "I know there is a lot of people here who can't wait to get their hands and fingers on this hardware."
"We're really proud of it," NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver told SPACE.com and collectSPACE.com. "It is going to start looking more like the shape of capsule soon. But to me, it looks like the future."
The Orion capsule, which arrived in Florida from the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana last week, now sits inside Kennedy's Operations and Checkout (O&C) building. It is in here, the same high bay where more than 40 years ago NASA readied similarly-shaped capsules for launches to the moon, that Lockheed Martin engineers and technicians will conduct the final preparations to launch this Orion higher and faster than any capsule since the Apollo missions.
"The future is here, now," Kennedy Space Center's director Robert Cabana said. "The vehicle we see here today is not a Powerpoint chart. It is a real spacecraft moving toward a test flight in 2014."
"This is a milestone moment for the Space Coast, NASA and America's space program," Garver said. "It is a new and exciting chapter in America's great space exploration story, one that will see more discoveries, more scientific return, and more people and Americans going into space and going places that have never before been visited."
To space and back
The unmanned test flight, which NASA calls the Orion Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), is slated to launch in spring 2014 atop a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. After reaching orbit, the capsule will circle Earth twice, rising to more than 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) from the planet — 15 times higher than the International Space Station.
The Orion will then turn around and come home, re-entering the atmosphere at a blazing speed of more than 20,000 miles per hour (32,000 kilometers per hour) in an attempt to prove that its heat shield is capable of protecting the capsule — and its future crews — after missions out to an asteroid, the moon, and ultimately Mars.
"We're going to get about 84 percent of a lunar entry velocity, which is really going to stress the heat shield, which is exactly what we're trying to do," NASA's Orion program manager Mark Geyer said.
The EFT-1 mission will end with the Orion splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of the United States.
Before all of that can occur however, the bare pressure vehicle now at Kennedy Space Center needs to be outfitted for flight.
Building the future
By the fall of 2013, Lockheed Martin, NASA's lead contractor for Orion, plans to have the 16-foot wide (5-meter) capsule completed and looking more like a typical spacecraft. Its welded metal panels will be covered by an advanced version of the thermal protection tiles used on the space shuttle, and the capsule's belly will be covered with a modern variant of the ablative heat shield used on NASA's Apollo spacecraft.
"There are people ready with drill bits, and tubes, and pipes to start assembly of this vehicle as soon as we're out of here and out of their way," said John Karas, Lockheed Martin's vice president for human space flight.
The Orion will also be equipped with avionics systems and other instrumentation to fly and record the data from the flight test.
What the EFT-1 capsule will not have is the digital glass cockpit, crew seats, life support systems (including a planned toilet), or the solar panel wings that future, manned Orion capsules will require. These systems will be included on later test vehicles set to launch on NASA's next heavy-lift booster.
The Space Launch System (SLS), which was authorized by Congress last year and is under development now, is being designed to support both crew and cargo launches to destinations beyond Earth orbit. NASA is targeting its first uncrewed Space Launch System flight for 2017, with the first manned Orion flight to follow four years later.
