Orion Program

I'm too lazy to blog... I've thought of several things that I wanted to blog about in the last week or so, but I'm too lazy to leave my remote control and come type. Typing is hard!!!! I'm just kidding. But, this is why I've changed the title of my blog to "The Lazy Blogger".


Anyway, I wanted to blog about my work, because I think it's interesting stuff. For those of you who don't know yet, I've worked for Lockheed Martin for almost 6 years now, with the last 1.5 being in Denver working on the "Orion" program (also called Crew Exploration Vehicle, or CEV).


Orion is NASA's intended space travel system that will replace the space shuttle and allow us to return astronauts to the moon. The program has even loftier goals of eventually facilitating travel to Mars... that's a ways down the road.


To be fair, Orion is just a portion of a much bigger NASA program called "Constellation". Constellation consists of launch vehicles (rockets) calles Ares, Orion, and a Lunar Lander.


Orion consists of a "Service Module" (SM), a "Crew Module" (CM) and a "Launch Abort System" (LAS). You can read more about Constellation here, and about Orion here. You'll also find links to the Lunar Lander and other interesting stuff...


I play two roles on the Orion Program that are very much related. First, I lead the Transportation and Handling Equipment Design Team. Second, I lead the Ground Test Article Mechanical Ground Support Equipment (MGSE) Design Team. Both fall under the larger umbrella of MGSE Design. One distinction that I have on the program (which I have to admit I'm rather proud of) is that I designed the very first piece of hardware formally delivered to NASA for this program. It wasn't anything fancy, but it was first!! You can see pictures of my first Orion Delivery here.
In this picture, you're looking at a test article CM for our very first "abort flight test". I designed only the part on the top that is yellow, which as I mentioned before, isn't really that impressive, but since it was the first delivery, it gives me a sense of pride.








Anyway, I really like my job, and it's an exciting program. One day, it's likely you'll be watching tv, and see things that either I or one of my team members has designed. I know I haven't done the project justice in my description, but check out the NASA links above. On the Orion link, there are all sorts of other links to things that are going on in the program. Good stuff...