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Marshall Space Flight Center

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, plays a vital role in the Artemis program and has provided significant fabrication and test support to the Orion program since late 2012. Marshall is the lead center for the Space Launch System and manages NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the core stage of the Space Launch System is manufactured.

Marshall also provides support to NASA’s lunar Gateway; making critical contributions to the Human Landing System program and managing all science payloads and science communications on board the International Space Station.

Encyclopedia
Updated Feb 27, 2024
art001e000672 (Nov. 28, 2022) On flight day 13, Orion reached its maximum distance from Earth during the Artemis I mission when it was 268,563 miles away from our home planet. Orion has now traveled farther than any other spacecraft built for humans.

Orion Work

More than 1,500 parts for the spacecraft have been fabricated in Marshall’s machine shop. The largest machining effort was the dissection for analysis of the Exploration Flight Test-1 heat shield after its return to Earth. The insulation materials contained in the heat shield protect the crew during the return to Earth. State-of-the-art machinery at Marshall was used to remove all the material for analysis, thereby confirming analytical models used to estimate insulation design and thickness for future flights.

Among the many component parts machined were clips, sleeves and rod ends used for unique connections on the Orion spacecraft.

Engineers from Ames Research Center and Marshall Space Flight Center remove samples from the Orion heat shield that flew on Exploration Flight Test-1 in 2014. The heat shield protected the spacecraft from temperatures reaching 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Marshall also resolved processing questions on the Orion effort related to additive manufacturing. The field center’s advanced additive manufacturing laboratory helped to define a process to successfully fabricate complicated parts, and shared the process solution with commercial additive manufacturing shops to aid in 3D-printed parts fabrication for Orion.

The center also provides insight and oversight of environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) for Orion’s Crew and Service Module Office. Marshall assists Orion’s European Service Module Integration Office by providing Orion isolation valve refurbishment and Orion gas valve seat material testing, as well as support for European Service Module propulsion systems with subsystem-level hot fire test operations, data review, verification-related review, and closure reports and activities.