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With some schedule estimates at that point suggesting SLS might not be ready until well into 2021, NASA began looking at all their options to keep EM-1 on a 2020 schedule. One of those efforts was to request that NASA\u2019s Launch Services Program (LSP) evaluate the feasibility of substituting an existing U.S. commercial launcher or launchers to fly Orion on the EM-1 mission.<\/p>\n
LSP first heard about the study request from NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. on the weekend before the agency\u2019s formal submission of its Fiscal Year 2020 budget proposal on March 11. \u201cI think we first got word of it the weekend of the 9th and 10th of March, so we came in and hit it hard on that Monday,\u201d James Wood, NASA LSP Chief Engineer, said in an April 10 interview.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOf course we spent a little bit of time over the weekend scoping out how we were going to approach the problem and package it so that we could work it with a small team and work it quietly as we were initially asked to do. We had just spent a couple of solid days working the problem and then the Administrator (NASA Administrator James Bridenstine) I think his first mention of it in public was on the 13th.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so then we said \u2018OK, we\u2019re not going to worry about being altogether so quiet now\u2019, but we said we\u2019re going to just keep working this,\u201d he added. \u201cIt took right about two weeks before we had something that we were reasonably happy with.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/46647876594_56bdc49c07_k.jpg\")
<\/p>\nNASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine with Senator Roger Wicker, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on March 13 where he announced the EM-1 alternate launcher study. Credit: NASA\/Joel Kowsky.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe provided the assessment to Headquarters \u2014 to HEO (Human Exploration Operations Mission Directorate) and to the Administrator\u2019s office \u2014 we provided that, that\u2019s been out-briefed,\u201d Wood noted. \u201cTo my knowledge they are still assessing the results and I guess they\u2019re deciding whether or not they want us to do anything additional.\u201d<\/p>\n
The study was short, but busy. \u201cWe were definitely working it fairly intense,\u201d Mike Carney, NASA LSP Flight Analysis Division Chief, said in the interview. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say we were working all weekend on it but there were evidently some activities going on over the weekend or in the evenings.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSome late day phone calls between us and Headquarters that were happening on a regular basis to just give NASA Headquarters a status where we were with the study,\u201d Carney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was like having a mission on the West Coast,\u201d Wood added. \u201cThose are the normal hours we keep when we\u2019re launching out of Vandenberg.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition, LSP consulted with the existing NASA programs, Orion\u2019s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, and commercial launch service providers. \u201cFrom the flight design\/launch vehicle performance perspective, we were working with a couple of organizations outside of Kennedy,\u201d Carney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne was the Johnson Space Center (JSC) Orion folks and of course they had all of the information relative to the Orion mission design and specifics on the lunar injection delta-Vs and the trans-lunar injection (TLI) requirements and we were also working with the Marshall (Marshall Space Flight Center) folks that were tied to the SLS Program that had been working with JSC on Orion.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were familiar with a lot of the launch vehicle performance requirements and constraints and they were helping us just in general understand what we had to do from a performance perspective to satisfy the Orion mission requirements and just again integrate all that together.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was definitely a good collaborative effort, we had several just technical telecons between my flight design folks here at KSC (Kennedy Space Center) and then the JSC Orion folks that worked that part of the mission design portion of the problem and then again the Marshall folks that had been helping with the launch vehicle mission design as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Gateway-Delta-V-Comparison.jpg\")
<\/p>\nA chart comparing the velocity change (Delta-V) to get from different points between the Earth and Moon with or without the Lunar Gateway. Credit: NASA.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe based our analysis on the change in velocity (typically referred to as delta-V) required to get from low Earth orbit (185 km altitude circular parking orbit is what we primarily used in the study) into lunar transfer orbit,\u201d they said. \u201cThat delta-V value is approximately 3.1 km\/sec when departing from the 185 km circular parking orbit. In fact, for any low circular parking orbit near this altitude, the TLI delta-V will be approximately 3.1 km\/sec.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given the current circumstances, none of the launch provider options could close the performance case on its own, and for now NASA is pursuing other options to keep the EM-1 launch targeted for 2020.<\/p>\n
Study draws on LSP mission design and integration experience<\/p>\n
LSP provides the integration between NASA spacecraft programs and launch services providers like Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance, all the way from selecting a launch vehicle through liftoff and beyond. One of the unusual characteristics of the Orion alternate launcher study was how short a time period was given to look at feasibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to doing the advanced mission study work and quoting launch vehicle performance, we get asked to do that all the time,\u201d Carney explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s primarily through a request that comes from our traditional spacecraft customers, so the science payloads that we work with all the time that have a concept or an idea for a mission. And they\u2019ve got a rough mass estimate and they\u2019ve got some general idea of where they want to go and of course one of the first questions is \u2018hey what kind of a vehicle do I need, how big of a vehicle do I need to get this much mass to this orbit?’\u201d
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/L2-banner@2x.jpg\")
\u201cWhat you were describing were your daily kind of work in support of announcements of opportunity for a typical science and meteorology type mission,\u201d Wood added. \u201cThat\u2019s normal daily business and you\u2019re going to expect that we\u2019re going to have a three or more year integration cycle for any one of those missions.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cNot only was that [Orion] stack already built \u2014 and it\u2019s much heavier than anything we\u2019ve ever carried with one of our mission customers \u2014 but then you\u2019ve got the added burden of being able to execute that on a very fixed timeline \u2014 like suddenly having a planetary mission pushed onto your plate.\u201d<\/p>\n
LSP is managing several existing projects and part of the study was to assess whether they had the resources to add this project with a fast-approaching launch window to their workload.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that I thought of as one of the reasons why they asked us to be the ones to look at this, [is] because we\u2019re not just a mission design concept house,\u201d Wood explained. \u201cWe only need to look in the mirror to find the guys tasked with doing it and would be finding out firsthand whether or not we had a good idea or not when we said this was feasible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we looked at this very much from the standpoint of we\u2019re going to be the ones to have to do this, now how are we going to manage it, how are we going to bring this off? And oh, by the way, in 2020 we\u2019ll have missions like Solar Orbiter, Mars 2020 a nuclear-powered rover very similar to the Curiosity rover, and couple of other missions that very much need our full attention,\u201d he added .<\/p>\n
\u201cOur Program Manager, Amanda Mitskevich, and her deputy Chuck Dovale, they were very closely engaged with everything that we were doing because we had to work it as a fully integrated team and what resource trades, what schedule trades, and priority trades that we were going to have to make actually bring this off if somebody said \u2018OK, you said the idea was feasible, now go do it.’\u201d<\/p>\n
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With a mid-2020 Administration deadline for Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) fast approaching, NASA tasked its Launch Services Program (LSP) to study commercial launch alternatives for sending its Orion spacecraft into lunar orbit on an uncrewed test flight. Delays in the assembly and test schedule for the agency\u2019s Space Launch System (SLS) booster assigned to launch EM-1 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8535,3718,678,624],"class_list":["post-38062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-delta-iv-h","tag-em-1","tag-falcon-heavy","tag-sls"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}