Soaring Higher: NASA Aeronautics Enhances Orion’s Flight Performance in the Atmosphere

The journey to space starts and concludes with a passage through the Earth’s atmosphere, and NASA’s Orion spacecraft follows this rule.

Scheduled for launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday, Orion’s inaugural flight aims to confirm years of research and evaluations carried out in NASA’s wind tunnels and aeronautical laboratories situated across the country.

Throughout its four-and-a-half-hour mission, the uncrewed Orion capsule is projected to accomplish two orbits around the Earth – achieving a maximum elevation of 3,600 miles – before re-entering and landing in the Pacific Ocean, where it will be retrieved.

Orion’s ascent and descent should proceed more effortlessly, thanks to NASA’s aviation innovators.

Each of NASA’s four conventional aeronautical research facilities – Langley Research Center in Virginia, Glenn Research Center in Ohio, and Ames Research Center as well as Armstrong Flight Research Center in California – have played a role in Orion’s evolution, applying expertise and testing resources routinely employed for testing aircraft structures and parts.

Among the numerous contributions from these NASA facilities:

• Creation of Orion’s launch abort mechanism, which included testing of scaled models of the Orion capsule in wind tunnels at Langley, Glenn, and Ames, along with full-sized capsule flight evaluations spearheaded by Armstrong in New Mexico.
• Experiments that necessitated multiple drops of an 18,000-pound Orion mock-up into a large pool at Langley to assess splashdown forces (additional assessments using a more detailed model equipped with a heat shield are scheduled for 2016).
• Flight evaluations conducted from Armstrong utilizing NASA research aircraft to safely and cost-effectively test and re-test automated piloting systems intended for use on the Space Launch System.
• Vital documentation of capsule parachute deployment system drops in Yuma, Arizona, captured by videographers and photographers from Armstrong’s fleet of aircraft.
• Analysis of the thermal protection systems’ (TPS) functionalities, which includes trials of heat shield materials subjected to extreme temperatures using Ames’ arc jet facility; Ames researchers will also be present at the splashdown to aid with post-flight examinations of the heat shield and TPS.
• Upcoming evaluations to gauge Orion’s durability against vibrations experienced during launch on the Space Launch System rocket using a 55,000-pound vibration-simulating table at Glenn’s Space Power Facility in Ohio.
• Video documentation of the Orion splashdown utilizing a NASA unmanned aerial vehicle piloted by a member of the Armstrong team.

Aeronautical contributions to space exploration can actually be traced back to an organization that was established nearly a century ago.

NASA’s capacity to create vehicles that journey to space and return to Earth has its roots in the personnel and aeronautical expertise of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, which was formed on March 3, 1915. When the NACA transitioned to NASA in 1958, many of its brightest individuals took on significant roles in the nation’s mission to land a human on the moon.

Among them was NACA staff member Robert F. Thompson, who became the head of recovery operations in the early 1960s, overseeing recovery efforts for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. The legacy and essence of that work will be prominently displayed during Orion’s splashdown and recovery phase.