Its not your fathers Apollo........
New spacecraft not your father's Apollo
Northrop/Boeing unveils latest model
Thursday, October 13, 2005
By Bruce Alpert
Washington bureau
WASHINGTON -- One of the two major competitors to build the next era of American space vehicles unveiled its design model Wednesday, and it looks a lot like NASA's old Apollo spacecraft.
But executives with Northrop Grumman Corp. and the Boeing Co., which are putting together a joint proposal to NASA, said that their Crew Exploration Vehicle benefits from significant technological advances not available for the old Apollo program. The new spacecraft is scheduled to take astronauts and payloads to the international space station by 2012 and back to the moon by 2018.
The Northrop Grumman/Boeing design is of more than passing interest to New Orleans because Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Space Systems unit is the other major competitor for the new space vehicles. If it is the winning contractor, Lockheed Space Systems might well do at least a portion of the work, if not the major construction, at the Michoud Assembly Plant in New Orleans. The company already has said it will build much of a prototype of the vehicle at the local plant.
Potential sites for development of the new spacecraft under Northrop Grumman/Boeing could include facilities in California, Houston, central Florida and Huntsville, Ala.
Leonard Nicholson, the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team's deputy program manager, said that though it's too early to project costs, or personnel decisions, he would expect whatever management team wins the final NASA contract to rely on the "expertise" of workers who put together components of the shuttle program. The shuttle system, which has relied on Michoud for external fuel tanks, is being phased out to make way for the new crew exploration vehicles.
Though similar in appearance to the Apollo spacecraft that lifted astronauts to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the model for the new spacecraft put together by Northrop Grumman/Boeing teams is nothing like "your father's Apollo" in terms of capacity and safety features, according to Doug Young, the program manager.
Though only slightly heavier, the proposed spacecraft will carry up to twice as many astronauts as the three that traveled on Apollo and carry substantially more fuel, allowing for longer space missions. The design, according to Young, incorporates redundant features allowing for the safe return of astronauts even in the case of serious system failures.
The spacecraft, according to NASA specifications, must be designed so that it could be used for both manned and unmanned missions.
Young said the expanded capability is all because of major advances in technology.
"Look back 12 or 15 years at what we carried around for music, like a Sony Walkman; you had 14 songs on a tape, and now we got iPods with hundreds of songs that are a 10th the size," Young said.
Lockheed executives are expected to discuss their design efforts for the new NASA spacecraft in the next several days, according to company spokesmen.
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