The Orion crew capsule that can ride atop NASA's planned Ares I rocket has a Preliminary Design Review slip from September 26th to November 21st. The Critical Design Review slips even further from September 2009 to April 2010. While schedule slips are nothing new in aerospace, it it still tough news for a team that would prefer to see the gap between shuttle retirement and Orion shrink rather than grow.
[It is important to reiterate that the shuttle retirement is necessary to close out contracts and stop paying for shuttle production and processing facilities and personnel in order to free up funding to ramp up Constellation work. If the shuttle flies past 2010, no matter the flight rate, many of those facilities and capabilities will need to be maintained and little funds will be available to the Constellation program to complete the Ares I, Ares V and Orion projects.]
The slip is claimed to be the result of a range of issues, from the capsule still being too heavy for the under-performing rocket , to a change in the avionics (read: spaceship dashboard- it's a concatenation of aviation electronics), to "cost threats" of the program (presumably meaning potential overruns are a threat).
The NASASpaceflight.com article also talks about how the engineers are currently working on how to keep the crew from overheating in an off nominal landing in tropical waters. Landing in cold water isn't a problem because the ship and their suits are so insulating, but landing in hot water (above 19 degrees Celsius or 66 degrees fahreheit) without being able to open the hatch is harder. There is just not the mass or the power budget to add a cooling system for the capsule that can function more then 15 minutes. They have plans for a snorkel and fan but that is mostly to control CO2 and provide a little ventilation.
This all seems a lot more relevant after last months off-nominal landing of the Russian Soyuz capsule that ballistically reentered and landed miles from its expected landing zone. If this were to happen with a water landing the Orion baselines calls for the capsule design to be able to support the crew for 36 hours in case rescue crews cannot reach them right away. The Orion, which originally was to land on land has now reverted to an Apollo splash-down style landing in order to conserve precious mass. The impact is that the salt water makes refurbishing the capsules for reuse that much more difficult. There is also a cost associated with keeping a number of large ships on standby in the landing region to be available to retrieve the crew.
NASASpaceflight.com speculates that if the crew cooling issue (when they land in hot water) is not worked out that NASA may revisit their decision to baseline land landings.
Indeed even a technical trade off as understandable to the lay person as this gives me an appreciation for just how complicated it is to build a new spaceship- you really have to think of everything. Now just imagine the other thousand design variables that they are optimizing. Then realize that every change you make has a resulting change in other systems and you can soon see that this is a massive systems engineering task. I don't know how you speed a process like that up (beyond throwing money at it), but there has to be a way.
Orion PDR date slips - Off-nominal landing concern evaluated [NASASpaceflight.com]
See Also:
- Orion's Landing: One if by Land, Two if by Sea
- Orion Launch Tower Escape System Will Be World's Third Largest Roller Coaster
- SpaceX Passes NASA Review of Their Plans to Dock with Space Station
Image courtesy NASA
