A job for Rocket City
Expect similarities but no Apollo clone for lunar missions
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Working in secret, engineers in Huntsville are competing to come up with the design for the spacecraft that will take astronauts back to the moon.
From the outside, the spacecraft will resemble the Apollo Command Module that astronauts flew to the moon and back nine times.
NASA wants its new Crew Exploration Vehicle - the CEV - to be big enough for six astronauts for trips to the International Space Station and four for trips to the moon, one more astronaut than the Apollo Command Module.
Competing against engineers at Lockheed Martin, a Northrop Grumman-Boeing team is building an engineering test model here but doesn't want to say where or discuss specifics, said Doug Young, Northrop Grumman's vice president of space systems. "It's a capsule shape, but the interior is a competitive area for us."
But compared to the Apollo capsule, the new spacecraft's computers will be vastly improved and the ship may even use propellants made on the moon and Mars. And this time no one will remain on board the spacecraft while it orbits the moon.
NASA wants to send all four crew members to the lunar surface. During Apollo, a crew member remained in lunar orbit in the Apollo capsule while the other two astronauts worked on the surface.
With all the crew working on the moon for up to a week at a time, the capsule will orbit above on advanced autopilot.
That places a lot of faith in a computer, and the Northrop-Boeing team believes today's technology will fly the capsule safely with no one on board, said Leonard Nicholson, Boeing's CEV program manager in Houston.
"We've got the technology to make that happen," he said. "We didn't when we built Apollo and the space shuttle."
The CEV will depend on monitoring systems and fast computer networks that send data from a lunar lander to the crew vehicle, said Nicholson. "There will be adequate data available and backups for the crew to monitor the CEV health from the moon's surface."
Apollo on the outside
After President Bush's January 2004 announcement to return to the moon, engineers looked at a variety of ideas for a new spacecraft, from a winged minishuttle-like design to pointy spacecraft. NASA chose the tried and true capsule shape, almost a NASA trademark from the 1960s.
The resemblance to Apollo ends at the shape, said Cleon Lacefield, Lockheed Martin's CEV program manager. The new capsule will be lighter even though it will carry four people to the moon.
"It's a modernized design in an Apollo shape," Lacefield said. "There's nothing wrong with that. Look at the Apollo record. That program's got a lot of things right and the blunt capsule shape was one of them."
New Huntsville engines
Whatever the CEV's mission - flying to the space station, the moon or maybe Mars - a Huntsville rocket will loft it into space.
That means a lot of work will be done here testing and ensuring the crew capsule and new rockets for the Crew Launch Vehicle work well together, aerospace managers said.
Houston's Johnson Space Center, responsible for NASA's manned space flight programs, will manage the CEV program, but aerospace companies say Marshall Space Flight Center's more than 40 years' experience in spacecraft design are valuable to it.
Last spring, the Lockheed team used the Marshall Center to conduct drop tests of a capsule model to check out re-entry and water landing properties of parachutes and landing concepts, Lacefield said. Also, Lockheed plans to use Marshall's labs to develop propulsion and system concepts and to integrate those into a final design.
The Northrop Grumman-Boeing and Lockheed Martin teams expect to lean on Marshall expertise and engineering design work to develop a new type of propulsion system for the new spacecraft, managers from the aerospace companies said.
NASA wants a rocket engine that uses liquid oxygen and methane as propellants. Now, NASA's rocket engines use either liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen or kerosene.
NASA planners hope to develop ways to extract oxygen and methane from lunar material to reduce the weight and cost of space missions.
"It's a new concept," Nicholson said. "It will not only let crews use lunar material for fuel but it has a vast potential application for any Mars missions planned in the future.
"That's one of NASA's long term goals - to be able to make and use propellant on Mars."
The aerospace contractors are expected to wrap up their studies after the first of the year, but have no job numbers or specifics on how much work Huntsville would gain from the CEV program. NASA managers want to make a selection sometime in June 2006 and return to the moon by 2018.
"There's a lot of work to be done," Lacefield said "And Huntsville will be part of it."
© 2005 The Huntsville Times
© 2005 al.com All Rights Reserved