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Space Technology

Apollo Upgrade

Aviation Week & Space Technology, 10/17/2005, page 58

Frank Morring, Jr., Washington

Northrop Grumman/Boeing team sees cost as big factor in upcoming CEV competition

Striking the right level of technology sophistication to hold down costs will factor highly in the upcoming competition to replace NASA's space shuttle fleet. The agency has already described in some detail the "Apollo-on-steroids" approach it wants to take.

Managers of the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team competing to start developing the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) next spring say their proposal will be an "evolved" version of the Apollo command module/service module combination. It will be sized to fit the Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) NASA is developing on its own, but the team is selecting proven technology for internal systems that could accommodate new technologies down the road.

"NASA is obviously being very prescriptive about things," says Doug Young, Northrop Grumman's vice president for Space Systems and program manager for the CEV team with Boeing. "They're laying out the milestones and the test program and exactly what they want to see, so it's going to be very much about a cost competition."

Unlike the competing Lockheed Martin-led CEV team, which revealed the lifting-body concept it proposed at the end of the first phase of the competition (AW&ST May 9, p. 32), the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team has kept its concept under wraps while NASA worked out the modified CEV development plan Administrator Michael D. Griffin ordered after he took office in April.

Young says both Boeing and Northrop Grumman have been working on capsule concepts since NASA first sought industry input on a shuttle replacement. Their proposal uses the Apollo Command Module ballistic capsule shape "based on the availability of the aero data" generated in the 1960s, he says. But the capsule's innards will draw on developments since then in such fields as advanced materials, structures, avionics, thermal control and computer software.

"We're taking advantage of all the technology that's been developed since Apollo, and that certainly makes a huge difference in terms of the weight of the structures, lightweight structural materials," says Leonard Nicholson, a former space shuttle program manager at NASA, who was named deputy program manager of the Northrop Grumman/ Boeing CEV team last week. "You couldn't use composites back in those days for this kind of thing, [but] you can today, as well as aluminum lithium, so there are all kinds of materials that make the structure lighter."

Although NASA has called for a six-seat vehicle 5.5 meters in diameter, with three times the volume of an Apollo capsule, the CEV should be only "slightly heavier" than the original, the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team says. The final weight will be determined by the internal systems selected, Nicholson says, and those systems will be much more capable than those that accompanied Apollo crews to the Moon.

Among modern technologies that will be available are integrated vehicle health management systems and the advanced avionics necessary to oversee vehicle health and decide any needed corrective actions automatically. "Those kinds of things will make it far more productive in terms of the amount of time the crew will have to go do the science and the exploration," Nicholson says.

To hold down costs, the Northrop Grumman/Boeing team plans an open-architecture "plug-and-play" approach that incorporates technology that has already been demonstrated, with room for relatively easy future upgrades. This translates to technology readiness level (TRL) 6--technology that has been demonstrated at the system or subsystem level in a relevant environment.

"We want to keep the cost under control, so we would plan to use technology that exists today in terms of where it's very close to being ready for flight," Nicholson says. "We call it a TRL 6. The only time you would not do that is when the requirements just absolutely make you go and develop something that's not quite that mature. But the way you keep programs under control and make programs work on time is by being extremely careful about using things that aren't proven today."

One area requiring significant development is the pressure-fed liquid oxygen/methane rocket engine NASA wants to power the CEV, beginning with its role as a crew transport to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA believes this engine will be able to extract methane from the atmosphere of Mars, thus saving weight on the outbound journey (AW&ST Sept. 26, p. 24).

"NASA's going to play a big role in how that development's done, so that's a particular area where we see NASA taking a big role in doing some of the early risk reduction, [in] which we'll be closely involved with them," Young says.

Similarly, Young sees NASA setting the flight test regime for the CEV, since it is planned to be launched on a new CLV that NASA will largely develop internally, based on a single space shuttle solid rocket booster and an upper stage with a modified space shuttle main engine (AW&ST Sept. 26, p. 22). The two-company team hopes to make its first flight in 2011-12, provided NASA gets the funding it needs.

Other areas, such as the solar arrays that will power the CEV for as long as 180 days in lunar orbit while its crew works on the surface, will draw on the best technology available today, Nicholson says. Thermal protection will follow the basic ablative-materials concept used in Apollo, but with upgrades to account for the larger size and a bolt-on feature to allow relatively easy replacement for the limited reusability NASA wants.

While it wants to recover the CEV with a parachute system like the one on Apollo, NASA has asked the competing companies to make proposals for how best to handle the surface impact in its preferred land touchdown. The Northrop Grumman/Boeing team is still studying airbags, retro rockets, collapsible structures and "a few other strategies" for its proposal, Young says.

The two competing teams expect NASA to issue a call for improvements on their original bids soon, and the Lockheed Martin team is already adjusting its proposal to meet the new capsule requirement (AW&ST Sept. 26, p. 26). Nicholson says his team's basic approach will be to develop a six-seat vehicle adaptable to the four-person lunar mission, an unpiloted cargo mission to the ISS, and ultimately to be used to go to Mars with the appropriate long-duration habitation module.

Unlike Lockheed Martin, which hopes to lead its CEV team throughout development of the new exploration architecture, Northrop Grumman and Boeing have divided the lead role by exploration task.

"Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the CEV over its entire life cycle," Young says. "So we'll be doing production and sustaining as the prime contractor, with Boeing as our principal teammate. When the next elements of the manned architecture come along--say it's a lunar lander or an Earth-departure stage--that's when Boeing will step in and lead as the overall prime contractor. That's a function of how the government decides to go and acquire these pieces and parts."