![]() Meanwhile,Morin and his fellow astronauts have been working to best identify exactly whatkey systems Orion crews will need to operate, the best shape for windows and otherfeatures. The rest of thewalls, he added, are expected to be usable free space. Lacefieldsaid that storage space will line the floor - on Earth - of Orion in the formof a wall of lockers, while the area directly opposite of the main windows isreserved for electronics, life support and computer equipment. "There's a lot of capability in these seats." "Theseseats are designed so that if you lost two of the four parachutes duringlanding, the crew is secure," Lacefield said, adding that the seats are alsodesigned to keep astronauts safe should their capsule tip over to one sideafter touchdown. Two launcharrangements - a six-seater for ISS-bound flights and four-person array forlunar missions - are on the drawing board, with the seats themselves made up offoldable metal frames connected by sturdy webbing. Like NASA'sApollo vehicles, the entry hatch is mounted to Orion's side while a dockingtunnel - for either the ISS or lunar vehicles - opens at the top. "The whole idea is to maximizevolume."Īt leasttwo more windows, one to either side of the pilot and commander seats, and onehatch portal are planned for Lockheed's current Orion design. "It's goingto be a lot larger than Apollo," Lacefield said. With adiameter of about 16.5 feet (five meters), Orioncapsules are expected to have about 2.5 times the habitable volume of theirApollo predecessors, with all primary systems routed through a fold-out panelof touch screens that swings into place above the pilot and commander seatslocated beneath the primary windows. ![]() ![]() So you don't haveto have a zillion and one switches." "We aregoing to have smart and there will be a keyboard in between,and from that you can receive all the information you need. "The Apollowasn't really in the computer age," Cleon Lacefield, Lockheed's Orion programmanager, told during a tour of a spacecraft mock-up. While theOrion vehicles owes much of its capsule look to NASA's Apollo vehicles, whichcarried astronauts to the Moon and Skylab space station during the late 1960sand early 1970s, its updated interior and avionics will bring the designsquarely into the 21 st century. ![]()
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