This Was America's Future Space Craft, Finally Ready for Testing
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Tuesday, Jun 08, 2010
.
Engineers have made the final welds on the first ground test model of the Orion crew capsule, which was once envisioned as a way of getting U.S. astronauts back to the Moon and to Mars, but which now lingers in budgetary limbo.
The completion of the capsule comes ironically just as NASA ousts its manager of Constellation – which includes Orion and the Ares rocket that would carry it – and the contractor in charge, Lockheed Martin, moves 600 people off the Orion project. Although Constellation remains part of NASA’s strategy on paper, Lockheed officials made the decision likely because the company expects the program to eventually be halted later this year.
Read more about the murky future of NASA on Motherboard
Although the Obama administration has called for the cancellation of Constellation amidst skyrocketing costs, it’s expected that the cost of cancellation would also spiral into the billions of dollars.
“Given the revised interpretation of how to account for termination liability, LM and its subs will be moving 600 people off the contract," said Orion manager Mark Geyer in an address to his workforce, which was acquired by Nasaspaceflight.com. “Also LM has halted several key procurements.”
Amidst growing concerns over job losses and the wastefulness of abandoning the Constellation program (Apollo astronauts have called Obama’s plan a mission to nowhere), the Obama administration had proposed repurposing the Orion crew capsule as a lifeboat, or crew rescue vehicle (CRV) for the International Space Station. But the ISS already has an evacuation plan that involves two Soyuz vehicles, which would allow six astronauts to depart from the Station in the event of an emergency.
Learn how Lockheed Martin built the Orion test model, on Mobo
Prior to the workforce changes at Lockheed Martin, roughly 4000 people were employed on Orion, working at over 100 companies all across the US.
“We all love what we are doing,” Larry Price, Lockheed’s Deputy Program Manager for Orion told Nasawatch.com last week. “We have a team, young and old, who are all very committed to the Orion program. We want to put astronauts into space and continue building the Orion for the foreseeable future and beyond.”
"This is the type of job that a tremendous number of people want to work on because they realize the end result is amazing," said Mark McCloskey, the Lockheed Martin Senior Production Manager for Orion at Michoud, Louisiana. “So, we never had problems trying to get people to work on this program. Orion is the kind of program that we’ll tell our grandkids about and be proud of working on forever.”
Filed under:
About the author
Email: alexp at motherboard dot tv. @pasternack,
