Engineers Chet Graham, left, and Tom Byers, right, attach a collar to the escape vehicle on the Orion spacecraft at the Lockheed Martin facility in Denver on Friday, Aug. 12, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

 

DENVER
(AP) — A spaceship that could carry the next wave of astronauts to an
asteroid or beyond is being prepared for a new round of tests at a
Lockheed Martin facility near Denver.

Engineers
have attached a launch-abort system to the nose of the capsule and will
subject the combined spacecraft to a series of experiments to see if it
can withstand the rigors of blastoff, Lockheed Martin said Friday.

The
launch-abort system, essentially a rocket attached to the nose of the
capsule, could lift the capsule off its booster rocket and carry it to
safety if a problem developed before or during launch.

Lockheed
Martin, of Bethesda, Md., is building the capsule, called the Orion
Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, under a $7.5 billion NASA contract issued in
2006.

The
capsule was originally part of President George W. Bush’s $100 billion
program to return astronauts to the moon, called Constellation.
President Barack Obama canceled the program last year, saying the U.S.
would concentrate on developing new rocket technology instead.

Obama
then revived the Orion portion of the program amid criticism that his
plan lacked details and put U.S. space leadership at risk.

Orion
doesn’t yet have a destination. NASA has said it could service the
space station in low Earth orbit or take four astronauts on more distant
missions of up to 21 days. Lockheed Martin officials have said Orion
could explore the far side of the moon, land humans on asteroids or take
them to one of the moons of Mars, where they could control robotic
instruments on the surface.

In
the next round of tests, the capsule and launch-abort system will be
subjected to sound vibrations at a Lockheed Martin facility in Waterton
Canyon south of Denver.

Engineers attach a collar to the escape vehicle on the Orion spacecraft at the Lockheed Martin facility in Denver on Friday, Aug. 12, 2011. They will use it to move the assembled craft to the testing chamber at left where it will be submitted to vibration testing. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

The
55-foot-tall assembly will be lifted by a crane into a tall, elevator
shaft-like chamber. Inside, more than a dozen horns powered by
compressed nitrogen will create a thunderous low-pitch noise at 150
decibels. That will trigger vibrations like the ones generated by a
launch or deployment of the abort system.

“It sounds like a freight train and a tornado all at once,” Lockheed Martin’s Paul Sannes.

Instruments on the capsule and abort system will tell engineers how well they hold up.

The
abort system was successfully tested in May 2010 at White Sands Missile
Range, N.M. An Orion mock-up was rocketed about a mile into the air at
speeds of about 450 mph in just 2.5 seconds. The capsule then deployed
parachutes and floated to the ground.

It landed about a mile north of the launch site.

After
the vibration tests are finished, the spacecraft will be taken to the
NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., for landing tests. It
would land in the ocean.

SOURCE: The Associated Press