There is an 18 percent chance of rain forecasted for Thursday morning’s long-awaited flight test launch of Orion, NASA’s next-generation spacecraft slated to eventually send astronauts into space, according to Weather Underground.
The roughly 2.5-hour launch window opens at 7:05 a.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., according to a NASA statement. Mark Geyer, NASA’s Orion program manager, said Tuesday the unusually-large launch window gives stakeholders a lot of flexibility in case rain becomes an issue.
“We’re used to space station launches where you have a very tight window,” Geyer said during a media briefing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “(We will launch) as early as we can so we have light here, so we can see the separation events.”
NASA spokesman Michael Curie said International Space Station (ISS) launch windows featuring the retired Space Shuttle were small in comparison because the shuttle was trying to chase down ISS, which is about 220 miles into space travels at 17,500 mph. With the amount of thrust available from two solid rocket boosters and three Space Shuttle main engines, Curie said there was only a 10-minute window, meaning after the ideal launch time in the center of the window, there were five minutes remaining.
Currie said, as opposed to flights to ISS, NASA isn’t trying to rendezvous with something in space. It’s launching to a fixed location and the launch time is only dictated by having sunshine for launch and splashdown.
Formally known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), Orion will launch, uncrewed, on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket. During its 4.5-hour trip, Orion will orbit Earth twice and travel to an altitude of 3,600 miles into space, according to NASA. Geyer also said the early launch time gives recovery crews based off of Baja California, Mexico, time to recover Orion during daylight.
The flight test is designed to test many of the elements that post the greatest risk to astronauts and will provide critical data needed to improve Orion’s design and reduce risks to future mission crews. Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin’s [LMT] Orion program manager, said Tuesday the test flight is to test critical technologies not just in the low-earth orbit (LEO) environment, but farther out.
Hawes said Orion stakeholders will look to see the effects of the Van Allen Belts, which are doughnut-shaped zones of highly-energetic charged particles trapped at high altitudes in Earth’s magnetic field. Hawes said the Van Allen Belts could upset Orion’s computers, which he said have been designed to recover from the belts’ radiation effects.
ULA Director of Mission Management Ron Fortson said Tuesday the company has performed quite a few readiness reviews leading up to launch. Fortson said a systems certification review, where ULA’s technical team went through the risk associated with the mission and approved the company to proceed, took place Monday. The launch vehicle was examined Tuesday morning in the launch readiness review and was also approved to proceed, he said.
Industry is also developing its own space capsules for manned spaceflight. NASA earlier this year awarded a $4.2 billion contract to Boeing [BA] and a $2.6 billion deal to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) to develop their own crew modules capable of delivering humans to ISS by 2017 (Defense Daily, Oct. 22).
ULA’s Delta IV Heavy configuration features three RS-68 engine cores plus a RL-10B2 second stage, all developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Lockheed Martin develops the Orion space capsule. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing [BA]. Aerojet Rocketdyne is a division of GenCorp [GY].