I Helped NASA Develop A Spaceship They Will Probably Never Use

It has been more than 40 years since NASA built a spacecraft to take people into space. NASA is planning on sending humans farther than ever before by building the Orion spacecraft. It is designed to be used for human deep space exploration for the next several decades. Potential destinations for Orion include near earth asteroids, the moon, and Mars. This is exciting since humans have not ventured past low earth orbit since the Apollo missions. In addition to deep space missions, Orion is also capable of transporting people and cargo to the International Space Station. Where Apollo only carried three crew members, the Orion is able to carry six to and from the space station and four astronauts to the moon. It has the ability to stay in orbit around the moon unattended for up to six months while astronauts explore the moon’s surface. For extended travel, a deep space habitat can be connected to the crew module and landing module. Orion also has a state of the art heat shield protects the capsule from temperatures of up to 5000 degrees fahrenheit which is more than half the surface temperature of the sun.

Inside the sexy Dragon V2

All of this sounds good, but in reality, Orion is just an incremental improvement on what has already been done before with Apollo and Space Shuttle missions. The crew capsule itself is reusable, but the whole service module is discarded with each launch. Additionally, there is no propulsive landing which means the capsule still needs to land in the middle of the ocean with a parachute. In my opinion, this is really lame and unimaginative. In comparison, the Dragon V2 being developed by SpaceX has full reusability and can carry 7 astronauts to and from the ISS. It is also designed for propulsive landings with the accuracy of a helicopter and rapid reusability. For interplanetary travel, SpaceX is developing the BFR (Big Fucking Rocket). Like it’s name implies, it’s really big. Like 100+ passengers to Mars kind of big. It will also be completely reusable. So what does this mean for Orion? My guess is that it will be obsolete before it is ever approved for human flight.

The Big Fucking Rockets that SpaceX plans on building soon.

The reason I chose Orion as my topic is that I had the unique opportunity in 2013 and 2014 to work with NASA on the development of the capsule recovery procedures. I was a Navy Diver assigned to Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit 1 and just happened to be at the right place at the right time. We first flew to Houston where we met the Orion team, dived with astronauts in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and hung out in the ISS Mission Control Room. Finally, we got down to business in the pool with an Orion dummy capsule. The nerds had all kinds of ideas on how to best recover the capsule and we tried out the different techniques and contraptions they had and gave them feedback on what would and wouldn’t work in the open ocean. They wanted us to dive under the spacecraft dragging a big cargo net so a ship could scoop it up with a crane. That barely worked in the pool and would have been too cumbersome to do in the open ocean. Then they wanted to attach a bumper system around the capsule to protect it from bouncing around in the ship well deck. Again, this proved cumbersome and they decided to just put bumpers on the well deck of the ship. A few months later we took the dummy capsule out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and practiced the procedures in real world conditions and sea state. What ended up working the best was having three small boats nose into the capsule all at once and hook three different tow lines to the spacecraft. While they do that, a diver drops down and films the underside of the capsule with a GoPro to document any damage from re-entry. Two of the boats then run their lines to the back of the ship and throw them on board. The third boat then guids Orion into the back of the welldeck of the recovery ship while it is being towed in. And just like that, you got yourself a spaceship! Later that year those procedures were used to recover Orion from it’s first trip into space. Even though opean ocean spacecraft recovery is somewhat of a dying art, I still feel very fortunate to have been able to be part of it.

Pulling Orion into the well deck.