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Orion, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, is a key piece of the NASA human exploration architecture for beyond earth orbit (BEO). Lockheed Martin was awarded the contracts for the design, development, test, and production for Orion up through the Exploration Mission 2 (EM-2) in 2021. 2014 was a landmark year for Orion and NASA’s human spaceflight program. For the past few years, the Orion team has been focused on Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1). EFT-1 completed a nearly flawless mission on December 5, 2014. EFT-1 was launched by a ULA Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle. The mission included one orbit in low earth orbit (LEO) followed by an elliptical orbit with an altitude of 5800 km. This is the highest altitude achieved by a human-capable spacecraft since Apollo 17. This elliptical orbit set up the conditions for re-entry at 81% (8.9 km/s) of the expected ∆V of a lunar return. The total time for the mission from launch to splashdown was 4 hours and 24 minutes, with additional vehicle powered time to collect heat soak-back data after splashdown. The vehicle was recovered and has been returned to Kennedy Space Center. The flight test objectives for EFT-1 focused on successfully executing the mission, including ground systems integration, critical separation events, thermal protection system performance for the high energy return, and the descent, landing, and recovery sequence. EFT-1 included 1200 channels of Development Flight Instrumentation to obtain external environmental data and the vehicle’s response, in addition to the standard operational instrumentation. Lockheed Martin delivered the final post-flight report to NASA 90 days after the mission. This paper will discuss the results of the post-flight analysis. All separation events were successful and the trajectory performance was nominal. Development Flight Instrumentation data results will be discussed, as well as lessons learned from the operation of the mission, including the recovery of the vehicle. These results demonstrate the key functionality of Orion, and validate the first steps towards a Mars exploration architecture. The next two flight tests for the Orion program will be Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) and EM-2. Work on these missions is well underway, with the critical design review on schedule for the fall of 2015. EM-1 will be approximately a 25 day uncrewed mission to a Distant Retrograde Orbit around the moon, in preparation for the Asteroid Retrieval Mission. EM-2 will be the first Orion flight with crew, also to orbit the moon. A successful Delta Preliminary Design Review (∆PDR) was held in the summer of 2014, reviewing all aspects of the EM-1/2 system design, with a focus on those items which changed since the original PDR in 2009. In the last year a number of system trades have been completed. These trades made updates based on lessons learned during the execution of EFT-1 and the new missions defined. This paper will discuss those trades, including the mass reduction effort, the change to manufacturing methods for the heatshield, updates to the avionics architecture to optimize fault tolerance, and the changes in the mission architecture due to the European Service Module international partnership.

The paper presents the design of the pressurization system of the European Service Module (ESM) of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). Being part of the propulsion subsystem, an electrical pressurization concept is implemented to condition propellants according to the engine needs via a bang-bang regulation system. Separate pressurization for the oxidizer and the fuel tank permits mixture ratio adjustments and prevents vapor mixing of the two hypergolic propellants during nominal operation. In case of loss of pressurization capability of a single side, the system can be converted into a common pressurization system. The regulation concept is based on evaluation of a set of tank pressure sensors and according activation of regulation valves, based on a single-failure tolerant weighting of three pressure signals. While regulation is performed on ESM level, commanding of regulation parameters as well as failure detection, isolation and recovery is performed from within the Crew Module, developed by Lockheed Martin Space System Company. The overall design and development maturity presented is post Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and reflects the current status of the MPCV ESM pressurization system.

The Evolvable Mars Campaign (EMC) is the current NASA Mars mission planning effort which seeks to establish sustainable, realistic strategies to enable crewed Mars missions in the mid-2030s timeframe. The primary outcome of the Evolvable Mars Campaign is not to produce "The Plan" for sending humans to Mars, but instead its intent is to inform the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate near-term key decisions and investment priorities to prepare for those types of missions. The FY'15 EMC effort focused upon analysis of integrated mission architectures to identify technically appealing transportation strategies, logistics build-up strategies, and vehicle designs for reaching and exploring Mars moons and Mars surface. As part of the development of this campaign, long duration habitats are required which are capable of supporting crew with limited resupply and crew abort during the Mars transit, Mars moons, and Mars surface segments of EMC missions. In particular, the EMC design team sought to design a single, affordable habitation system whose manufactured units could be outfitted uniquely for each of these missions and reused for multiple crewed missions. This habitat system must provide all of the functionality to safely support 4 crew for long durations while meeting mass and volume constraints for each of the mission segments set by the chosen transportation architecture and propulsion technologies. This paper describes several proposed long-duration habitation strategies to enable the Evolvable Mars Campaign through improvements in mass, cost, and reusability, and presents results of analysis to compare the options and identify promising solutions. The concepts investigated include several monolithic concepts: monolithic clean sheet designs, and concepts which leverage the co-manifested payload capability of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) to deliver habitable elements within the Universal Payload Adaptor between the SLS upper stage and the Orion/Service module on the top of the vehicle. Multiple modular habitat options for Mars surface and in-space missions are also considered with various functionality and volume splits between modules to find the best balance of reducing the single largest mass which must be delivered to a destination and reducing the number of separate elements which must be launched. Analysis results presented for each of these concepts in this paper include mass/volume/power sizing using parametric sizing tools, identification of unique operational constraints, and limited comments on the additional impacts of reusability/dormancy on system design. Finally, recommendations will be made for promising solutions which will be carried forward for consideration in the Evolvable Mars Campaign work.

Satellite servicing has been a proven capability of NASA since the first servicing missions in the 1980s with astronauts on the space shuttle. This capability enabled the on-orbit assembly of the International Space Station (ISS) and saved the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) mission following the discovery of the flawed primary mirror. The effectiveness and scope of servicing opportunities, especially using robotic servicers, is a function of how cooperative a spacecraft is. In this paper, modularity will be presented as a critical design aspect for a spacecraft that is cooperative from a servicing perspective. Different features of modularity are discussed using examples from HST and the Multimission Modular Spacecraft (MMS) program from the 1980s and 1990s. The benefits of modularity will be presented including those directly related to servicing and those outside of servicing including reduced costs and increased flexibility. The new Reconfigurable Operational spacecraft for Science and Exploration (ROSE) concept is introduced as an affordable implementation of modularity that provides cost savings and flexibility. Key aspects of the ROSE architecture are discussed such as the module design and the distributed avionics architecture. The ROSE concept builds on the experience from MMS and due to its modularity, would be highly suitable as a future client for on-orbit servicing.

The Space Launch System (SLS) has a co-manifested payload capability that will grow over time as the rocket matures and planned upgrades are implemented. The final configuration is planned to be capable of inserting a payload greater than 10 metric tons (mt) into a trans-lunar injection trajectory along with the crew in the Orion capsule and the service module. The co-manifested payload is located below the Orion and its service module in a 10-meter high fairing similar to the way the Saturn launch vehicle carried the lunar lander below the Apollo command and service modules. A variety of approaches have been explored that utilizes this co-manifested payload capability to build up infrastructure in deep space in support of future asteroid, lunar, and Mars mission scenarios. This paper is a report on the findings from the Advanced Concepts Office study team at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, working with the Advanced Exploration Systems Program on the Exploration Augmentation Module Project. It includes some of the possible options for habitation in the co-manifested payload volume on SLS. Findings include module designs that can be developed in 10mt increments to support these missions, including overall conceptual layouts, mass properties, and approaches for integration into various scenarios for near-term support of deep space habitat research and technology development, support to asteroid exploration, and long range support for Mars transfer flights.