CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The capsule NASA is designing to fly astronauts to an asteroid or perhaps someday Mars will get its first taste of space after a planned maiden launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Mission managers on Tuesday gave a 'go' to proceed toward a 7:05 a.m. blastoff of an unmanned Orion capsule atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket.
The four-and-a-half-hour, $375 million Exploration Flight Test-1 mission is a brief but high-profile early test of NASA's human exploration ambitions, at least seven years before astronauts are expected to climb in Orion.
'Thursday is a huge day for us,' said Mark Geyer, NASA's Orion program manager. 'It's the beginning of exploration; it's the beginning of actually putting Orion into space.'
Forecasters predict a 60 percent chance of weather good enough for a launch during a window that extends two hours and 39 minutes at Launch Complex 37.
Here's a by-the-numbers look at the what's in store during this unique test flight:
* 243: The height in feet of ULA's Delta IV Heavy rocket and the Orion system standing on the pad at Launch Complex 37. A 330-foot service tower is expected to roll back from the pad around 11 p.m. today.
* 2 million: The approximate pounds of thrust with which the rocket will lift off. With three first-stage boosters strapped together, each producing 663,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, the Delta IV Heavy is the most powerful rocket flying today. NASA is developing a far more powerful rocket, the Space Launch System, to send Orion as far as the moon or beyond on future flights.
* 2: The number of orbits Orion will fly before its re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. Orion will arrive at its initial orbit between 115 and 550 miles up about 17 minutes into the flight. Nearly two hours in, the Delta IV's upper stage engine will ignite again to push Orion higher.
* 3,600: The peak altitude in miles Orion will reach, just over three hours after liftoff. That's 15 times higher than the International Space Station and farther out than a spacecraft intended to carry people has flown in decades.
'It is a big deal,' said Mike Hawes, Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin, NASA's lead contractor on the spacecraft. 'This is the first human-rated spacecraft that's gone beyond (low Earth orbit) in 42 years.'
The distance will push Orion through the lower Van Allen belts, where engineers are keen to see how spacecraft's two flight computers handle potential 'upsets' caused by high radiation levels. And it sets the stage for a test of the capsule's heat shield that is the test flight's main event.
* 17: The number of separation events involving parts of the rocket and spacecraft. Some of the critical ones are the jettisoning of fairings shielding Orion's service module and of a launch abort tower, and the crew module's separation from the service module before re-entry. A cover must also pop off the top of the crew module so parachutes can deploy for a controlled splashdown.
Orion's service module is mostly a dummy simulating the mass that would be carried on manned missions. The launch abort system also is not fully functional, since there's no crew. The crew module represents the 'guts' of the test, Geyer said.
* 1,200: The number of sensors measuring the heating, vibration, noise and radiation Orion experiences throughout its flight, including inside where astronauts will sit years from now.
* 20,000: The speed in mph Orion will be traveling as it re-enters the earth's atmosphere.
* 4,000: The maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit that Orion's heat shield will be experience, about four hours and 15 minutes into the flight.
At 16.5 feet in diameter, the heat shield is the biggest structure of its kind, more than 25 percent wider than an Apollo capsule's. Its Avcoat coating, very similar to what Apollo capsules used, is 1.6 inches thick and fills 320,000 honeycomb cells. Models predict about 20 percent of it will burn off.
'The key part of the test is seeing whether those aerodynamic models were correct, and we guessed right, because that affects the thickness and the mass overall that we're going to use,' said Geyer.
* 8: The number of parachutes that must deploy to brake Orion as it falls toward the Pacific Ocean, including three main chutes, each 116 feet in diameter. They'll slow Orion's descent to 20 mph at splashdown roughly 600 miles west of Baja California.
* 2: Number of U.S. Navy ships deployed to recover Orion, led by a Kennedy Space Center team. They plan to pull Orion into a well in the USS Anchorage amphibious ship. As a backup, a crane could lift the capsule onto the USNS Salvor. And Orion could return to a San Diego port by Sunday, and is expected to be trucked back to KSC, where it was assembled, before Christmas.
* 500: Approximate number of media members NASA has accredited to cover Orion's first launch.
'It's launch week, and that's a wonderful thing,' said Mike Bolger, manager of KSC's Ground Systems Development and Operations program. 'It's almost like there's a buzz in the air during a launch week. You can feel it.'
* 1 in 30: The odds of a mission failure.
'We expect it to go fine, but you really have to fly it to go test it out,' said Geyer.
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Entities 0 Name: Orion Count: 22 1 Name: NASA Count: 6 2 Name: Geyer Count: 3 3 Name: Launch Complex Count: 2 4 Name: KSC Count: 2 5 Name: Delta IV Heavy Count: 2 6 Name: Pacific Ocean Count: 2 7 Name: Ground Systems Development Count: 1 8 Name: Mike Bolger Count: 1 9 Name: San Diego Count: 1 10 Name: Baja California Count: 1 11 Name: moon Count: 1 12 Name: United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy Count: 1 13 Name: Kennedy Space Center Count: 1 14 Name: Van Allen Count: 1 15 Name: CAPE CANAVERAL Count: 1 16 Name: Mark Geyer Count: 1 17 Name: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Count: 1 18 Name: ULA Count: 1 19 Name: Lockheed Martin Count: 1 20 Name: Earth Count: 1 21 Name: Fla. Count: 1 22 Name: Mike Hawes Count: 1 23 Name: U.S. Navy Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1yazuSC Title: NASA's Next-Generation Spaceship Set for Test Flight : DNews Description: A NASA spaceship in development for nearly a decade is poised to make a two-orbit, 4.5-hour flight around Earth this week to test its heat shield, parachutes and other equipment needed to one day fly astronauts to and from Mars.
