HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- What kind of carbon-fiber and epoxy and aluminum spaceship would you ride into the frigid near-vacuum of space? For NASA, the only answer is a spaceship that's been tested -- thoroughly. A new round of that testing for future composite capsules began this week at Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center.
The full-sized test capsule now at Marshall's Environmental Test Facility isn't a current-generation Orion capsule like those destined to fly on early missions of NASA's new heavy-lift rocket. Its inner layer is an aluminum honeycomb core, and the outer layer is carbon fiber. The test capsule was built in layers by Alliant Techsystems technicians in Iuka, Miss.
Marshall, where the bonding process for joining the layers was developed, is also where the conditions of space can be simulated in the Environmental Test Facility's vacuum chamber.
The plan is to seal the capsule in the chamber and drop the atmospheric pressure to the near-vacuum level the capsule would encounter in space. It will be filled with helium during the test.
In space, any unplugged leak could easily be fatal. So, in the tests, engineers will watch for small helium leaks, determine where they are and attempt to fix them.
The team has already completed 10 tests and will be testing the capsule throughout the summer. The data will be used as NASA tries to lower the weight of future spacecraft by increasing their amount of composite material. Lower weight in the capsule means more weight available for scientific or life-preserving cargo.
The first generation of Orion flight capsules is well on the way to production. NASA will test one in a drop test next month and launch an unmanned Orion to deep space in 2014. See Orion video below.
The test team for the Huntsville tests includes staff from Marshall; NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; Goddard Space Flight Center in Md.; Kennedy Space Center in Fla.; and the Boeing Company in Huntsville.