Lunar Spacesuits in the Making – Part II
“I am excited about the new partnership between NASA and Oceaneering,” said Glenn Lutz, project manager for the spacesuit system at Johnson. “Now it is time for our spacesuit team to begin the journey together that ultimately will put new sets of boot prints on the moon.”
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With the new space developments by Oceaneering International Inc. of Houston, Texas, several things need to be considered in the making with a minimum set of hardware to meet all the mission phase requirements, such as a common and evolvable infrastructure. Another requirement is that one spacesuit should have two configurations which share as many components as possible, in addition to it being component-based open architecture, modular and reconfigurable.
At a total value of $302.1 million dollars for the first basic performance period from June 2008 to September 2014, the contact includes the initial work on the design of the suit for the lunar surface requirements, in addition to the designing, development, testing, and evaluation work for its manufacture, assembly and first flight for the Orion flight aboard the crew exploration vehicle. The second phase will run from October 2014 to September of 2018, at a cost of $260 million dollars depending on hardware requirements. Phase2 will cover the suit production, processing, and sustaining engineering under two different structures—a cost-plus-award fee or a firm-fixed-fee—with indefinite delivery, indefinite-quantity contract structure.
Designs will need to cover four astronauts when returning to the moon, and six astronauts when traveling to the space station, with the suit being required to support a week’s support of moon walks once they arrive for short trips. After that, they will need to last as long as six months for outpost expeditions, providing against capability and protection during launching and landing environments.
NASA’s new spacecraft system, the Constellation—involving both Ares and Orion—will be tested later this summer with the NASA and Alliant Techsystems (ATK) and their new vertical stand, supporting the Constellation Program. Used for the abort motor to test-fire the full-scale abort motor, this testing stand will sit on top of the Orion crew exploration vehicle, designed to pull the module away from Ares I in an emergency situation which can occur on the launching pad, or during the first 300,000 feet after the initial lift-off. With the ATK facility in Promontory, Utah, the next few months will be spent performing its final checkout.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 8:49 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News, The Gear to Get There. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
