NASA is getting closer to manned missions to the moon and Mars. And that journey goes through Ohio.
NASA Glenn’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky has the world’s largest test facility that can simulate each stage of a spacecraft’s mission.
In the Acoustic Test Facility is were the Orion test capsule will be subjected to 155 decibels, that’s like standing behind a jet engine. It simulates some of forces during take off.
The test capsule will be launched next April as part of the ascent abort test. Engineers want to make sure the spacecraft and crew could safely return if something went wrong during launch.
“You get almost a half a million pounds of thrust out of the abort motor, accelerates the crew module away from the rocket,” stated Jon Olansen from the Orion Flight Test Management Office at NASA Johnson Space Center.
Over the last few years a number of different parts of Orion have been tested at Plum Brook.
“There are a lot of capabilities that excited here that allows us to understand how this vehicle is going to preform in it’s flight environment,” said Olansen.
While the Orion may look like the Apollo capsule, this isn’t your grandfather’s spacecraft… it more like a high tech computer.
“We’ve got 2 million lines of software code in this vehicle. The crew doesn’t have to be pilots anymore, they can be scientists and medical doctors and such to do exploration,” said Larry Price Lockheed Martin’s Orion Deputy Program Manager.
Next year a more complete version of Orion will come to Ohio for testing. It will be used in a 3 week unmanned mission to moon. The last flight test before manned missions begin.