WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. –NASA’s Pad Abort 1 flight test, a launch of the abort system designed for the Orion crew vehicle, lifted off at 7 a.m. MDT Thursday at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Las Cruces, N.M. The flight lasted about 135 seconds from launch until the crew module touchdown about a mile north of the launch pad.
The flight was the first fully-integrated test of this launch abort system design. The information gathered from the test will help refine design and analysis for future launch abort systems, resulting in safer and more reliable crew escape capability during rocket launch emergencies.
“Today’s successful crew escape test flight demonstrates cutting edge solid rocket motor technology that has application to many different launch vehicle systems,” said Stephen Gaddis, deputy launch abort system manager at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “This success is a real compliment to our team with all the hard work they’ve done over the last four years.”
The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., in partnership with lead center Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., is responsible for providing propulsion oversight during the development of the three motors, which includes an abort motor that pulls the Orion capsule from danger, an attitude control motor to provide directional control and the jettison motor that separates the system from the crew module. Marshall also has supporting roles in thermal analysis, structures, mechanisms, avionics, systems engineering, flight test and ground operations.
“Through hard work and incredible dedication over the past several years, the Orion Pad Abort 1 team has successfully tested the first U.S. designed abort system since Apollo,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This system is much more advanced in capability and technology than any abort system designed in the past. NASA strives to make human spaceflight as safe as possible, and what we learned here today will greatly contribute to that goal.”
The test involved three motors. An abort motor produced a momentary half-million pounds of thrust to propel the crew module away from the pad. It burned for approximately six seconds, with the highest impulse in the first 2.5 seconds. The crew module reached a speed of approximately 445 mph in the first three seconds – with a maximum velocity of 539 mph — in its upward trajectory to about 1.2 miles high.
The attitude control motor fired simultaneously with the abort motor and steered the vehicle using eight thrusters producing up to 7,000 pounds of thrust. It provided adjustable thrust to keep the crew module on a controlled flight path and reorient the vehicle as the abort system burned out.
The jettison motor, the only motor of the three that would be used in all nominal rocket launches, pulled the entire launch abort system away from the crew module and cleared the way for parachute deployment and landing. After explosive bolts fired and the jettison motor separated the system from the crew module, the recovery parachute system deployed. The parachutes guided the crew module to touch down at 16.2 mph (24 feet per second), about one mile from the launch pad.
The Orion Project has begun the process of recovering all of the test articles from the WSMR range and will be evaluating all of the data over the coming weeks.
The Orion Project office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston led the launch abort system test team. System development is led by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in partnership with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
Langley designed and produced the boilerplate crew module for the flight test. NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., prepared the crew module for integration and led the flight test vehicle integration at WSMR with Lockheed Martin Corp. of Denver, the prime contractor to NASA for Orion. The nearby NASA White Sands Test Facility provided design, construction and management for the launch and ground facilities at WSMR, as well as personnel on the integration and launch preparation team.
Lockheed led the industry team development efforts for the launch abort system. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., provided design, development and support of the system; Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, of Magna, Utah, developed the abort and the attitude control motors; Aerojet of Sacramento, Calif., developed the jettison motor; and Honeywell of Morristown, N.J., provided the avionics for onboard control of abort sequencing and inertial navigation.
For more information about the Pad Abort 1 flight test, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/orion
