COVID-19 impacts and finishing assembly
We incorrectly reported in our previous story that ATLO processing work on the Artemis 1 spacecraft would be suspended shortly after it returned to the FAST cell as a part of NASA’s COVID-19 response; however, KSC is currently in Stage 3 of the agency’s response framework and NASA and Lockheed Martin are continuing hands-on work on Orion hardware with a small group of essential personnel while everyone else teleworks from home.
“For Stage 3 right now, the Artemis project, in general, has been deemed mission essential,” Wilson explained. “Not every piece part of that is essential but overall from an Orion standpoint, we’re trying to press forward with the Artemis 1 [processing] as best as we can. Our initial take was we wanted to certainly get it back into the O&C, get it back vertical — it wasn’t really meant to be on its side for long periods of time — and get it into the FAST cell into a place where we would be able to, if we had to for whatever reason, leave it in a stable configuration.”
“Primarily the NASA workforce is teleworking in total with the exception of a few people for very specific tasks,” Wilson said. “An example is the solar arrays are currently boxed up but they require a purge to be activated once a week, so we have somebody that goes in for an hour or two that does that. The other part of the NASA workforce is the support to do our quality inspections, the government mandatory inspection points, there’s a real minimal crew that does that.”
Credit: NASA (left), NASA/Frank Michaux (right).
(Photo Caption: Prominent upcoming hardware installations for the Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft have already been fit checked for earlier testing. On the left, the mated Crew and Service Modules in the FAST cell in November were mated to the Spacecraft Adapter (SA) cone (left, bottom) as they will be again prior to handover to EGS. On the right, both the SA cone and the solar array wings were installed on the Service Module for standalone Direct Field Acoustic Testing (DFAT) in the O&C last May. Those two sets of hardware will be connected and checked out with the spacecraft, along with the Service Module’s launch fairing panels.)
“On the Lockheed side we tried to let everybody telework as best we can,” he added. “A much smaller portion of the workforce are the touch labor that actually turns the wrenches and performs the testing so it’s hard to do telework there.”
“We’ve tried to take as much of the work as we can and make it in a way that we can do social distancing while we do that work so then we’re keeping six foot minimums between people and any of the tasks that we’re able to do that with we’ve continued. Working on a spacecraft it’s hard to maintain six feet of distance every place so we’ve been working with our health and medical folks and CDC (Centers for Disease Control) guidance to provide protective equipment for folks that do need to work closer than that and we’re trying to limit the amount of time.”
“So, in general, we’re trying to continue work on Artemis 1 as best we can,” he added. “We’ll probably lose a little bit of efficiency in doing that PPE (personal protective equipment) and the distancing but our workforce is the most important thing here and we want to make sure that we protect them.”
Following the post-shipment hardware and software inspections of the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin technicians will begin final hardware installations in the O&C. “We have to go do some checkouts, some performance testing to make sure we didn’t do anything to the spacecraft on the way back from Plum Brook,” Jules Schneider, Lockheed Martin Orion Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) Director at KSC, said.
“Once we do that we’ve got to load another software update. Then we’ve got to do some prop (propulsion system) and ECLSS (Environmental Control and Life Support System) leak checks to make sure we didn’t have any issues with things leaking based on the transportation.”
“And really after that, it’s just getting the vehicle configured to hand off to ground ops,” he added. “So we’ve got to put it back on the SA (Spacecraft Adapter) cone, make that connection for flight. We’ve got to install the fairings (Spacecraft Adapter Jettisoned panels).”
Credit: NASA.
(Photo Caption: Composite of two NASA diagrams showing all the launch elements of the Orion Service Module (left) and the relative location of the Orion spacecraft hardware to the launch vehicle stack (right). The diagram on the left depicts the CMA (top), European Service Module (ESM, middle), the SA cone (bottom), the three Spacecraft Adapter Jettisoned (SAJ) panels that make up its launch fairing. The ogive-shaped launch fairing for the Orion Crew Module is integrated into the Launch Abort System (LAS).)
“Before we put the fairings on we’ve got to put the solar arrays back on, but really it’s just getting everything finished to hand off to ground ops. We’ve got to put the forward bay cover back on, just getting everything ready to go.”
The four solar array wings (SAW) and the SA cone will be attached first. “I don’t think either one of those is sequence critical it’s probably just the matter of access for us, which one gives us better access,” Schneider noted.
The solar arrays and the SA cone were attached to the Service Module last Spring for Direct Field Acoustic Testing (DFAT) that was performed before the Crew Module and Service Module were mated. The SA cone was reattached to the combined Crew and Service Module (CSM) in the FAST cell last year and then uninstalled prior to the CSM shipment to Plum Brook.
A SAW deployment test was performed when they were installed on the Service Module last year, so after the solar array wings are reinstalled for flight, the checkouts will be limited to a “first motion” test. “What you do is you’ll activate the restraints and then the restrains will come loose and then you can verify that they [the SAWs] can move,” Wilson explained. “I don’t believe we have a full deploy planned; we have done that previously, we did that after the acoustic test, but we don’t plan to do a full deploy.”
“No we don’t,” Schneider added. “We just check the gimbal mechanism to make sure it’s getting all the signals properly.”
The Spacecraft Adapter cone connects the bottom of the Service Module with the top of the launch vehicle. Three Spacecraft Adapter Jettisoned (SAJ) panels are fairings that surround the Service Module from the bottom of the Crew Module Adapter to the bottom of the SA cone, protecting its external, in-space systems like solar arrays and reaction control system (RCS) thruster pods from aerodynamic loads and heating during launch. The panels are jettisoned during ascent after the launch vehicle has carried the spacecraft above the dense layers of Earth’s atmosphere.
Credit: NASA/GRC/Bridget Caswell.
(Photo Caption: Larry Maggie, Quality Assurance Specialist with A-P-T Research, Inc., is seen in the hatchway of the Artemis 1 Orion Crew Module at Plum Brook on March 11 after the completion of testing. The spacecraft was being configured for its return transport to KSC. The interior of the Artemis 1 Crew Module, which will not be crewed for flight, can be seen in the background. Mass simulators already take up part of the volume and later in launch processing seats and restraints will be installed for anthropomorphic test devices (ATD) that will be part of mission experiments.)
No astronauts will be flying on Artemis 1 and the crew cabin will be configured for a small, inanimate crew. “The inside, it’s pretty much done from our perspective,” Schneider said. “We have mass simulators in there for the display and stuff. We put the [crew impact] attenuation system in but as far as the seats themselves, ground ops puts those in.”
“For the interior of the cabin almost all of the components, both prop and ECLSS are below we call it the ‘ECLSS wall’ or basically the floor; I know in space there’s no real floor but the aft bulkhead down tucked away in the backbone,” Schneider noted. The backbone assembly is part of the pressure vessel structure that fits into and effectively partitions the barrel on top of the aft bulkhead; for flight, panels fit over the backbone to create a floor level.
“Most everything except for the stuff that the astronauts need to get access to is tucked away down there under those panels,” Schneider added. “We do have avionics on the outside of the Crew Module and we also have avionics in the crew module adapter.”
Anthropomorphic test devices (ATD) that are part of the mission’s Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE) will be placed in the crew cabin during later preparations for launch.
Where to wait for the Core Stage
Lockheed Martin will officially turn over the Artemis 1 Orion “Short Stack” to NASA Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) for launch preparations, and the Spacecraft and Offline Operations team will pick up the spacecraft in the O&C, place it on a transportation pallet and payload transporter, and take it over to the Multi-Payload Processing Facility (MPPF) where it will be loaded with propellant, fluids, and other commodities for flight.
Credit: NASA/Bill Stafford.
(Photo Caption: An Orion test article floats off the coast of Galveston, Texas, in December 2018, during tests of the Crew Module Uprighting System (CMUS). The orange balloons for uprighting are inflated with gas from onboard tanks following splashdown. Prior to handing the spacecraft over from Lockheed Martin to EGS, the CMUS tanks have to be pressurized for flight, which has lifetime limits. Given current launch date uncertainty, NASA and Lockheed are looking at when the best time to perform this and other operations in the Artemis 1 launch processing schedule.)
Some time limits are imposed on the spacecraft once operations like propellant loading are completed, and NASA and Lockheed Martin are discussing when to perform those tasks since Orion is well ahead of the SLS Core Stage schedule, which is the critical path for Artemis 1 launch processing. The rocket stage is currently at Stennis for its last major pre-launch development test, the Stage Green Run campaign; however, around the clockwork was shut down when Stennis moved to Stage 4 of the COVID-19 framework on March 20.
“From a NASA perspective the critical path for Artemis [One] is SLS and the Green Run [hot-fire test of the Core Stage] which is currently scheduled in August is kind of the decision point where I think we’ll know much better and the agency will be able to pick with some certainty the launch date,” Wilson said. “The launch dates will be decided by [NASA] Headquarters depending on SLS.”
“We haven’t made the decision yet, but we may decide to dwell prior to hand off to EGS as opposed to after but all that’s pre-decisional now. We’re trying to gather the data on the lifetime limits of things to be able to provide some guidance.”
Lockheed Martin is identifying some of the tasks they will perform before handing over to EGS that also would impose lifetime limits and could hold off on those until there is more certainty to the overall schedule.
“NASA has asked us to get back to them our recommendations on how far to take the processing and then should we come to a stop based on different Artemis 1 launch dates, so we’re looking at that and we owe that back to NASA,” Schneider said. “I don’t think you would take it to the MPPF, you may just hold in the O&C so we can monitor different things that may have shelf lives associated with them.”
“For instance, there’s some pressurizations that we would do on the prop system that we do in the O&C,” Wilson added. “Some of the restraints that hold the solar array wings in place and things that have some lifetime requirements on them.”
“Batteries come to mind, too,” Schneider noted. “The batteries have life cycle issues that we have to maintain and monitor. We pressurize the CMUS tanks in the O&C and you don’t want those just sitting around for months and months and months so we would probably not put the forward bay cover on for flight until we pressurize the CMUS tanks and then go. So that’s just another example of things that you probably say, ‘you know what let’s sit tight,’ before we go do those things and find out where the launch date is and then we’ll back up accordingly and continue processing.”
Although there are tasks in the O&C that have lifetime limits, Wilson repeated that decisions on sequencing those tasks are still to be determined. “We haven’t made that decision to dwell yet, but those are the things that would drive that decision,” he said.
Credit: NASA.
(Photo Caption: A graphic of the Orion “Short Stack” in the MPPF for pre-launch servicing. Spacecraft servicing in the MPPF will include hazardous loading of commodities like hypergolic propellant, high-pressure gases, and coolant on the spacecraft. Prior to that non-hazardous servicing will be performed which could include crew cabin portable equipment installation and configurations and loading of commodities like potable water. Items and quantities will vary from mission to mission.)
Once Lockheed Martin hands over the spacecraft for launch processing, NASA EGS will take over handling duties with the prime contractor playing a consulting role. “A portion of our contract is to support the ground processing team,” Schneider noted.
“It’s just a handful of people and their job is to make sure that the ground processing team has all of the requirements that they have to follow to do whatever they have to do to process Orion and get it ready to launch and go. So how to load all the propellants and the different commodities, the charging of the batteries, all that stuff.”
“And in fact the Launch Abort System gets integrated to the short stack in the ground processing flow, so we have to give them all the instructions on how to integrate the launch abort system.”
“That’s the nominal portion of it and of course Lockheed is there if we have off-nominal things that we see or problems or something isn’t performing right,” Wilson also noted. “The beauty of having Lockheed Martin at the launch site is they are right there and able to help if needed.”
“Any kind of non-conformance that would come up with processing we would be there to address that,” Schneider added.
Lead image credit: Lockheed Martin.
