To The Moon! (In a Minivan)

The Driver's Seat A partial Orion mock-up known as the ROC (reconfigurable operational cockpit) allows astronauts to evaluate the craft's control panel by going through simulations of critical stages of a mission. The ROC has already been used to resolve disputes about window design.

Building 9 of Houston's Johnson Space Center is a vast training facility with a ceiling three stories up and a floor crowded with full-size spacecraft mock-ups--the shuttle, the International Space Station. Everywhere people are using the mock-ups to train for future missions. In one corner, an astronaut in a prototype moon/Mars space suit is doing an endurance test, carting wheelbarrows of rocks up an incline, monitored by a half-dozen attendants. Tucked between space-station modules sits a squat white cone not much larger than a medium-size family camping tent and made mostly of plywood and plastic: This is the full-size Orion crew-capsule mock-up.

Duck through the hatch and have a seat in the capsule, and the functional austerity of Orion becomes vivid. It is designed to carry six people to the space station, or four to the moon. With six metal seat frames bolted in place, there is no open floor space. The capsule feels snug with four people inside; none of us are wearing space suits.

A spot has been carved out for the toilet, tucked to one side, just below floor level. For privacy, it will have a wraparound curtain. It's definitely a step up from Apollo--which relied on adhesive plastic bags--but, really, no more private than the third row of a minivan.

During the 1960s, NASA commanded an army of 400,000 people who were furiously designing and building Apollo-- three times the number of Americans deployed in Iraq. Today, at Lockheed Martin, there are 1,600 people working on Orion, supported by another 600 at NASA. Overall, Constellation uses fewer than 5% of the number of people Apollo did.

During the '60s, NASA commanded an army of 400,000 people who were building Apollo. Today, Constellation uses fewer than 5% of that number.

Bill Johns is a senior manager for Lockheed, which won the $8 billion contract to build Orion in August 2006, over a joint team from Northrup Grumman and Boeing. Johns is chief engineer for the crew capsule. On the whiteboard in his office, there is only one thing boxed off with a note that says DO NOT ERASE. In the box, in green marker, is a question: WHAT DID APOLLO DO?

The question is central to Orion's unusual design philosophy. For every challenge facing Orion's engineers, there is a simple mantra: Borrow or buy before you invent.

That is, borrow technology NASA has already used, if it works. Buy technology from the commercial world that has been introduced in the past three decades, technology NASA didn't have to pay to develop or debug. And if you can't find a solution in stock or off the shelf, only then do you go into the NASA workshop and mix up something new. Everything is ultimately adapted for Orion, but the resourcefulness provides two things the manned space program needs: efficiency and confidence.

"Does paying attention to Apollo limit our thinking?" Johns asks. "Yes, it does. But I don't have any lack of young engineers coming up with great new solutions to problems--I get eight or nine of those for every problem. Engineers love to reinvent things. I use that question to make sure the engineers have actually checked to see what [their predecessors'] solution was."

Examples of NASA borrowing from its own heritage are everywhere. Orion will use a hatch design nearly identical to Apollo's. It will be launched on a solid rocket adapted from the shuttle.

Orion's parachute system, too, will be almost identical to Apollo's. "I've read all the reports I can find from that time," says Koki Machin, who leads the Orion parachute group at NASA. "They wrote reports out the wazoo. They did a really good job with parachutes." Machin's changes are small: The heavier Orion will use newer material and a larger diameter, and the chutes will be tethered to Orion with something light, strong, and pliable like Kevlar, instead of recalcitrant braided steel cable. Orion is even buying the parachutes from the descendant company that made Apollo's. They were a cutting-edge technology for Apollo, developed by a "parachute branch" that employed dozens of people. Machin's team consists of five, including him.