Budget, Technical Challenges Move Orion's First Launch to 2014

Oron mockup, from Dryden Flight Research Center/NASA

Facing both budget and technical challenges, NASA officials announced that the first launch of the new Orion spacecraft will be delayed by about a year from first estimates.  The first flight is now projected for September, 2014.

""We are slowing down the work to match and stay under our available funding, and to do that we had to go to a later date," NASA Constellation program manager  Jeff Hanley said. He said that the new program would meet the official target date of March 15, 2005.

The challenge for NASA is huge: design an entire new spacecraft program to replace the Space Shuttle. The system has to be able to dock with the International Space Station, dock with a lunar lander, and serve as a staging unit to send the lander on to the moon or Mars.

In creating a design for Orion, NASA actually looked backwards to the successful Apollo program, which, like its predecessors, used capsules on top of rockets.  The first components of the Constellation program  include two rockets: Ares I, which will launch the Orion module, and Ares V, a heavy-lift vehicle.

The Orion crew vehicle is intended to serve as an all-purpose work horse.  NASA lays out Orion's tasks as follows: "Orion will be capable of carrying crew and cargo to the space station. It will be able to rendezvous with a lunar landing module and an Earth departure stage in low-Earth orbit to carry crews to the moon and, one day, to Mars-bound vehicles assembled in low-Earth orbit. Orion will be the Earth entry vehicle for lunar and Mars return."

 Veteran aerospace giant Lockheed Martin is building the Orion. The craft's design include extendable solar arrays to generate onboard electricity and a crew cabin large enough for four astronauts. 

The Orion will serve as the "mother ship" for the Altair Lunar Lander.   The Ares V rocket will launch Altair. The Ares 1 will launch Orion, which will dock with Altair in space. Then all four astronauts, according to early plans, will board Altair for a flight to the moon--or one day, Mars.

Orion will land back on Earth using parachutes to slow its return. The system also includes a launch abort escape system. NASA and its contractor, Alliant Techsystems, or ATK,  recently conducted a successful test firing of ithe gniter that fires the abort motor. 

NASA has to plan for two types of Orion landings: planned and abort contingency. To support potential real-time decisions on landing locations, NASA is building in airbags to cushion the drop from space, and is  currently performing airbag drop tests. On July 31, a mockup of the Orion was dropped from a C-17 aircraft 25,000 feet above the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona.  The test also included ten extra parachutes to release the mockup from the plane, return the unit's test pallet, and get the mockup on the correct flight path. All but one of the 18 parachutes deployed successfuly.

Although Orion's primary mission will be to launch new moon missions, its design must also be flexible enough to support other goals.  "Our intent is to keep the destination focusing the design but we are not excluding the possibility of using Orion for other things, such as de-orbiting the Hubble Space Telescope in the 2020s or making a trek to an asteroid," according to Hanley.

While designing and creating  the Constellation program,  NASA is juggling a less-than-inflation-level budget  and tasks that also include continued Space Shuttle flights and maintenance of other ongoing programs, including the International Space Station,  Hubble Space Telescope, Cassini, the Phoenix Mars Lander, and a host of other space and scient projects.

NASA's fiscal year 2009 budget calls for  $17.6 billion, with $3.5 billion for development of new manned spacecraft systems. The budget, which accounts for less than one per cent of total federal expenditure, includes a  tiny 1.8 per cent increase over NASA's actual 2008 budget. Although the idea of an increase sounds good, government estimates say that  the rate of inflation for research-intensive agencies is about 2.3 per cent. This means that NASA is tasked with running all its current programs and designing an entire new space program while receiving less funds than the rate of inflation for their type of task.

With multiple components to design, build, and test, NASA has a full plate in creating Constellation. Although space enthusiasts may be disappointed at having to wait an extra year to see Orion fly, the reality is that spaceflight schedules often change, especially when budget restrictions slow the use of resources.