Lockheed Martin Is Working On Space Habitat For NASA
NASA has split a sixty-five million dollars grant among six contractors to build a prototype space habitat by the end of this year. The contractors include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems, Orbital ATK, Nanoracks and Bigelow Aerospace. NASA will evaluate each of the prototypes and proposals in order to better understand the systems and interfaces that are required to facilitate living in space for extended periods of time.
Lockheed is using the Donatello Multi-Purpose Logistics Module for their prototype. Originally the Donatello was constructed the purpose of conveying cargo to the International Space Station, but it was never put into service. Lockheed has refurbished a Donatello module for their entry into the NASA competition.
The Donatello is about fifteen feet wide and over twenty two feet long. It is about the size of a small bus. There are racks for equipment, life support systems, sleeping stations, exercise machines and workstation used to control robots. It will be close quarters for four astronauts to spend a month or two in the module.
Bill Pratt, the Lockheed program manager, said “You think of it as an RV in deep space. When you're in an RV, your table becomes your bed and things are always moving around, so you have to be really efficient with the space. That's a lot of what we are testing here. We want to get to the moon and to Mars as quickly as possible, and we feel like we actually have a lot of stuff that we can use to do that.”
The Lockheed team is using augmented reality headsets to help them visualize what the interior of the module will look like with all the equipment and furnishings installed.
NASA is working on the development of a habitation module for long missions to take astronauts to the Moon and Mars. The module that is selected in the competition will be attached to the Deep Space Gateway (DSG) that is being developed to orbit the Moon and serve as a way station for deep space missions.
The DSG will be much smaller than the International Space Station which weighs in at four hundred and fifty tons. The DSG will only weight about seventy-five tons and will include a habitat module, an air lock, a propulsion module, a docking port and a power bus.
NASA is collaborating with private contractors on the Space Launch System which includes the construction of the Orion spacecraft which will be the most powerful rocked ever built. The habitat and other modules will be attached to and launched by the Orion. They hope to test an unmanned Orion in a mission to orbit the Moon by 2020. If all goes as planned, there will be an manned Orion mission to the Moon in 2022.
The Orion rocket has been under development since 2004. One reason for the long development effort is related to the fact that it has to be a deep space craft able to handle the stress of a thousand-day mission to Mars. The Apollo mission allowed a small number of weld defects per inch. The Orion rocket specifications call for no weld defects at all.
The general manager of Lockheed Martin’s space division said, “This is the infrastructure for sustained human space exploration and so you have to account for every scenario that could come up, that's why the requirements are so stringent.”
Next month, the European Space Agency will deliver the European Service Module which will be installed below the habitat module on the Orion.