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.

Fortunately, there was a perfect arena to play out the window debate in Houston, and it illuminates the pragmatic culture that has sprung up around the Orion project. Squirreled away in a corner of Building 16 at Johnson sits the ROC (reconfigurable operational cockpit), a bare-bones Orion-capsule simulator. It is the creation of Michael Red and Alberto Sena, two NASA engineers who have worked on shuttle simulators for years and pulled together the ROC without anyone asking for it. "We just did it," Sena says. "We're trying to provide an immersion environment to aid the design."

The ROC includes just a small slice of Orion interior, made of white Masonite and simple aluminum framing. An ordinary bar stool with a blue-cloth seat pulls up to the control panel. Dangling overhead is a ping-pong ball on a thread. Adjust the height of the barstool so the ball rests on the bridge of your nose, pull your barstool up to the command console, and you get an astronaut's-eye view through the windows, behind which a computer plays a launch simulation on a big screen. Astronauts and designers were able to see what each of the 20 different versions of window configurations would show at critical stages of a mission.

This simple skunkworks took the guesswork out of designing the windows. "We were able to tweak them a little bit and get a lot more performance," Brown says. Because Orion is double-hulled (with an inner pressure shell and an outer thermal shell), the deep frames were blocking the view to each side. The astronauts were so determined to evaluate the views, Red says, that during simulations they'd end up sticking their heads right through the window holes to look around. Eventually, the windows were repositioned, and the frames were flared along the ship's hull to open up the field of view.

Total weight increase: 27 pounds. Total cost: little more than a few trips to Home Depot.

Space is a hard, unforgiving place. It will find the flaws--in thinking, in design, in human nature.

Spacecraft design is unforgiving in another important way--politically. There are plenty of critics of the course chosen by NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who since taking over in 2005 appears to be trying to get NASA to face reality: a dangerous, unreliable shuttle that is costing billions a year to keep flying; no replacement ready to take humans into space; insufficient money for robotic space science; surging space competition from other nations (notably China and India) and the private sector.

For decades, NASA's bosses and engineers have been scorched for shuttle flaws, most the result of design choices that pushed the technological envelope. Now criticism is already mounting for Constellation's perceived lack of ambition. To Griffin, Orion and Constellation are the way to get back to the business of space exploration in a rational way. "We don't have an infinite amount of money," Griffin said in a 2005 interview, as he was tightening the program's focus and timelines. "What we have is a specific task we're trying to perform, and I'm trying to do that in the simplest, cheapest, easiest, most prudent way possible."

"Space will be explored and exploited by humans," Griffin told Congress that year. "The question is, which humans, from where, and what language will they speak? It is my goal that Americans will be always among them."

Griffin is betting that Orion can become the symbol of a mature space program--one in which it's the destination that matters, not the transportation. The country hardly seems aware of this critical juncture, not just in 50 years of spaceflight but in 200 years of American exploration. If Orion does not succeed, Americans will be left grounded, for the first time in history simply shrugging at the frontier.

If Orion does not succeed, Americans will be left grounded, for the first time in history simply shrugging at the frontier.

Orion and Constellation can't come soon enough. NASA has said that the three space shuttles will be retired at the end of 2010; Orion is scheduled for its first manned flight in early 2015. So if everything goes perfectly, there will be a nearly five-year gap during which the U.S. will not be able to launch its own astronauts without outside help.

Launch Pad 39-B, at Kennedy Space Center, is one of only two equipped to launch manned rockets. Up close, Pad 39-B is testament to how brutal, even primitive, our approach to space remains. The grounds of the pad encompass 40 acres of scrub brush along the Atlantic Ocean, and much of the 40 acres is blackened by each shuttle launch. Most of the smoke you see in a shuttle launch is actually steam. Starting 17 seconds before launch, a water tower cuts loose 300,000 gallons of water onto the launch pad. The water has nothing to do with heat; it acts as a sound damper. The noise from the shuttle's engines is so powerful that without the protective deluge, the shock waves would bounce off the launch pad, ricochet up, and tear the spaceship apart as it ascends. Astronauts ride a controlled explosion to orbit.