Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
In just a matter of months, NASA will send a new spacecraft into space for the first time. And back here on the ground, the Mission Control Center in Houston will be at the helm.
“It’s the first flight of a brand new program,” said Mike Sarafin, lead flight director for Orion’s Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1). “There’s been a lot of testing done on the ground, but we’re going to really, no kidding, prove that this thing can fly.”
It’s a milestone for which Sarafin’s flight control team of about two dozen people has been preparing for two years, and this week they participated in their first joint integrated simulation, along with the Mission Management Team, the Test and Launch Control Center and the Engineering Support Team, all located in at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Covering the pre-launch and in-orbit phases of Orion’s mission, the teams had to deal with the kinds of problems that could require real-time decisions before and during the actual mission.
With no crew aboard Orion for the first two missions, flight controllers will serve as the eyes and ears monitoring the health and status of the spacecraft. If something goes wrong, it will be up to them to fix it. That’s not exactly a new concept for the team members, all of whom have experience at space shuttle flight control consoles under their belt. Skills such as understanding a failure, its impact and its workaround are talents that are bred into flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
But this won’t be quite like any mission they’ve flown before.
“Math is still math, engineering is still engineering, physics is still physics,” Sarafin said. “But the spacecraft subsystems, the design, the capability is all different. So we had to start from scratch and build our own displays and products and procedures.”
They did that with the help of the mission control engineering team, which just happened to be planning a major upgrade of all three of the main flight control rooms. The Mission Operations Exploration Office already had decided it would be necessary to modernize the facility in such a way that maintenance and operations costs would go down by half when the agency decided that EFT-1 would take place in 2014. The timing worked out perfectly for the two projects to develop side by side.
“Exploration Flight Test-1 will be the first time we’ve used this new equipment and platform,” said Jimmy Spivey, manager of the Mission Operations Exploration Office and mission operations for the Orion Program. “A lot of the training we’ve been doing with the flight control team has helped us wring out the system. It’s just been fantastic for us—having this test flight in this timeframe has been wonderful.”
Overall, Spivey said, the process has gone smoothly. The testing has revealed flight software problems the team was able to work through and repair with plenty of time to spare. They’ve done simulations, tested out new tools and communication loops in the redesigned control room and verified that Orion-formatted data could successfully be transmitted to mission controllers. The preparations aren’t complete; but, Spivey and Sarafin agree the team will be ready when it’s time to launch.
“When we show up on a mission day, we take for granted that our tools are going to work,” Sarafin said. “But there’s a lot of work that goes into that, and we’re in that phase now.”
Meanwhile, Spivey said, the team is enjoying the experience.
“I can’t tell you how many times team members have commented on what a big morale boost it is to get back in the flight control room and see spacecraft data,” Spivey said. “It’s been great to watch their reactions and dedication to getting us ready to fly Orion.”
As NASA’s prime contractor for the Orion Program, Lockheed-Martin is responsible for conducting EFT-1 and its mission manager, Bryan Austin, is directing the test. The primary control area will be Hanger AE on the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, which is used to support NASA evolvable expendable launch vehicle missions.
Lockheed-Martin personnel in both Houston and Denver are participating in the two-day simulation, as will personnel from the Orion Program, Ground Systems Development and Operations Program, and United Launch Alliance. The simulation will exercise the NASA Mission Management Team and Engineering Support Team decision-making systems and personnel.