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NASA announced Monday that it would order at least six reusable Orion crew caps at Lockheed Martin, for $ 4.6 billion, to allow astronauts to travel in the vicinity of the Moon in the 2020s. The agency has announced plans to purchase equipment for up to 12 Orion vehicles by 2030.
Orion Production and Operation Contract, or OPOC, establishes a production line for the Orion spacecraft to support NASA's Artemis program, which aims to send astronauts back to the lunar surface in 2024, a set deadline by the Trump administration earlier this year.
"This contract guarantees the production of Orion over the next decade, demonstrating NASA's commitment to establish a sustainable presence on the moon to bring new knowledge and prepare to send astronauts to Mars. NASA's director Brendstine said in a statement. "Orion is a state-of-the-art spacecraft, specifically designed for deep space missions with astronauts, and an integral part of NASA's infrastructure for Artemis missions and the 39, future exploration of the solar system. "
Orion vehicles will transport astronauts to a mini space station, or Gateway, orbiting the moon, where crews will be transferred to another spacecraft to take them to the lunar surface. The lander will bring the astronauts back to the bridge once their surface missions are over. The astronauts will leave the bridge in their Orion spacecraft and return to Earth for a landing at sea.
Following the first lunar landing of the Artemis program, NASA is planning a series of follow-up missions approximately once a year, with extensive exploration capabilities, to demonstrate the technologies and techniques of a future human expedition to Mars .
The Orion probe is a centerpiece of NASA's lunar exploration program, as is the Space Launch System, a large-capacity rocket built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The SLS will strengthen the Orion crew caps to the moon.
NASA chose Lockheed Martin to develop the Orion probe in 2006, when the capsule was part of the Moon Constellation program launched by President George W. Bush. The Constellation program was canceled in 2010, but the Orion spacecraft survived and was incorporated into a new initiative for deep space exploration under the Obama administration, focused on a human mission on Mars.
Sometimes referred to as the "crew versatile vehicle", the Orion space shuttle and its SLS launcher were redirected to the Moon under the Trump administration.
Before the new agreement announced Monday, NASA had entrusted Lockheed Martin with the construction of two Orion spacecraft able to fly on the Moon. The first lunar-capacity Orion satellite will launch, as part of the Artemis 1 mission, an unmanned test flight to launch the first flight of the Space Launch System heavy lift.
The Artemis 1 mission should be ready for launch in 2021, followed by the Artemis 2 flight in 2022 or 2023 with four astronauts on board. Artemis 2 will embark on a trajectory that will lead the Orion crew around the moon and on Earth.
The first of Orion's new crew capsule series will be launched as part of the Artemis 3 mission, which NASA has engaged to attempt to reach the first landing on the astronaut moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin's Orion Program Manager, said Monday that the company's new contract with NASA would include crew modules, full launch stop systems and adapters to connect the crew modules. Orion to their service modules manufactured in Europe. The contract also covers parts of European service modules purchased by Lockheed Martin, such as auxiliary rocket engines and network interface cards, Hawes said.
The construction of the European service modules themselves is funded separately by the European Space Agency. Airbus Defense and Space is the master builder of the Orion service module.
Buying Orion vehicles in groups of three allows Lockheed Martin and its subcontractors to increase productivity and realize cost savings, he said.
"The contract is structured as what NASA calls IDIQ, indefinite delivery / undetermined quantity, so that they can order as much as they want," Hawes said. "Three, that's what we were able to show NASA: it was a good starting point for achieving good cost savings by ordering at the same time."
The first set of three Orion vehicles bought by NASA on Monday for $ 2.7 billion will have an average cost of $ 900 million each. NASA has announced that it plans to order three more Orion vehicles during fiscal year 2022 for $ 1.9 billion, or $ 633 million per mission.
"I am delighted that Administrator Bridenstine has responded to my calls and is taking important steps for Johnson to continue to grow with the promising future of manned explorations," said Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in a statement. "There is still a lot of work to be done and I look forward to seeing production increase in the weeks and months to come, as well as more opportunities with NASA."
The announcement of Orion's production contract by NASA included statements by Cruz and other Texas lawmakers who praised the role played by the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where NASA ran the program Orion. The Lockheed Martin's Orion production line is located in the operations and crating building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
"We will heavily reuse all components from one flight to another, and we will also reuse complete structures and vehicles," Hawes said. "Some things, like the crew module adapter, because it's on the service module and is thrown on the fly every flight, it will be new every flight. The abandonment system, given that it is thrown at each flight, will be new at each flight. But one of the advantages of this second order is that we are starting to see the power of reuse and that the price drops considerably. "
According to NASA, the internal computers and electronics, as well as the seats and control panels for the Orion mission members of the Artemis 2 mission will be redeployed on Artemis 5. The entire Artemis 3 crew module will be reused on Artemis 6.
"We did qualifying tests for the internal components of five uses," Hawes told Spaceflight Now in an interview. "Elements such as avionics, flight computers, communication equipment, these kinds of things we plan to use five times. The main structure, certainly two (uses), and we will continue to work with NASA to demonstrate the data we obtained from our flight experience. I think we will continue to revisit how much we can use the structures. But we expect at least two people. "
"That's the theme," he said. "Once we have demonstrated the ability, then three flights later, this vehicle could fly again."
The Orion shuttle can accommodate up to four astronauts for autonomous missions of up to 21 days duration. Missions that land in a destination in space, such as the gateway, could take longer.
NASA could order equipment for as many Orion missions at Lockheed Martin as part of the new production contract, but Hawes said it does not mean that the 12 crew modules will be built.
"NASA is talking about a maximum of 12 missions," Hawes said. "This sentence is a little nuanced, because with the reuse plan that has prevailed since the beginning of the contract, we will certainly not build 12 spaceships."
"It is expected that these orders (an additional 6) will use all the reuse capabilities," he said. "These missions will be entrusted to NASA. They can be described as light reuse, ie components, as opposed to intensive reuse, ie the structure. Once we have received the Request for Proposal for these follow-up missions, we expect it to be based on an assumption about the nature of the reuse plan for each of these missions. "
NASA has ordered the first six Orion vehicles as part of a "cost plus incentive" program, a type of contract that considers the Orion spacecraft as a work in progress. NASA has announced that it will negotiate "firm price" orders for the following Orion missions, once the spacecraft design has stabilized and the production processes have matured.
"One of our challenges is that we have this first order. We must now respect the Artemis 3 calendar, but we have not completed the design of some essential systems, such as life in its own right. support and crew controls and displays, "Hawes said. "It's the biggest pieces that have been added. And then, in 2022, we expect a second … order of three missions … but we still have not stolen Artemis 2, most likely.
"So it's really the risk factor of those early flights, is that we just did not finish and demonstrated that our development task was complete," said Hawes. "And from then on, because of the reuse, we see a good (cost) reduction in this second order, and then the following orders will be firm fixed price, and we hope to continue to see savings of price.
"We did a lot of things in terms of the vehicle to bring down the price," said Hawes. "Bulk ordering is one of the great things we've worked on. We continued to work on advanced technologies, more 3D printing. We are currently using augmented reality in some of our building processes. As a result, many of the things we have learned over the past two years are fully implemented with this new contract. "
At the same time, Airbus delivered the first European service module for the Artemis 1 mission and production of the second unit for Artemis 2 is well underway. ESA has authorized Airbus to start purchasing equipment for a third Orion service module for the Artemis 3 mission. European officials have expressed interest in supplying additional service modules until the 2020s.
The service modules provide propulsion, thrusters, electricity, water, oxygen, nitrogen and thermal control of the Orion spacecraft.
At a congressional hearing last week, a senior NASA official said the agency was planning to set up a similar production contract for the space launching system in the United States. about a year.
NASA has dedicated more than $ 16 billion to the development of Orion spacecraft since the launch of the program under the George W. Bush administration. When NASA announced Lockheed Martin as Orion's lead contractor in 2006, Orion's first mission with humans on board was scheduled for 2014, followed by a crewed lunar landing in 2020 .
The development of the space launch system began in 2011. At that time, NASA had announced that the first test flight of the SLS could take off by the end of 2017.
But political reorientations, technical problems, poor performance of subcontractors and NASA's mismanagement have slowed the progress of the SLS and Orion programs.
In a report released in June, the Government Accountability Office wrote that "the performance of entrepreneurs to date (on SLS and Orion programs) has not produced the desired results in terms of program cost and schedule." The GAO also identified "significant gaps" between contractor performance and the award that NASA paid to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, despite persistent delays and rising costs.
The GAO also "found that NASA had made programmatic decisions – including establishing moderate cost and time reserves, managing tight schedules, and not following best value management practices – which have worsened the technical challenges expected for large scale acquisitions. "
"As a result, NASA has promised too much what it could offer in terms of cost and schedule," the GAO said.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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