Original subtitles

Our seafaring nature has translated well to the space age,

sailing out into the unknown in search of riches of one kind or another.

While Europe and Asia continue their interest in the resource-rich Moon,

the United States and NASA have set their sights on nothing less

than manned missions to Mars.

Can they manage to go shore to shore

on the most dangerous of unknown seas, deep space?

With low Earth orbit harnessed, it is time to look further afield.

To build a spacecraft and rocket system to reach Mars

is a mammoth undertaking,

but if successful, it will return the United States to the top of the space achievement ladder.

The first requirement:

a space capsule able to carry six astronauts for a long period of time

and return them safely to Earth.

Orion is its name and it has flown once already in a shakedown.

The next flight will be an unmanned test mission past the moon,

followed by a third manned mission.

The components for the vehicle are developed around the country,

tested and checked, then passed on for assembly.

The minutest bolt and circuit is designed, tested, redesigned

and tested again.

Slowly the systems come together,

with the aid of some breakthrough technology,

particularly in manufacturing methods, new materials and processes.

The first thing to notice is that NASA have gone back

to the classic conic shape like Apollo, the safest design yet devised.

Avionics, control systems, computer software and a glass cockpit,

all state of the art.

...and the concept was to go with a glass cockpit

and what that means is that the instruments are all images

on a computer screen.

They are all on glass, so rather than flipping a physical switch,

the crew brings up a computer screen and flips a virtual switch,

a little icon of a switch or icon of a valve,

and with the exception of seven panels right around the computer screens,

which have about 60 switches,

that is all of the cockpit of Orion happens on the glass.

One big benefit is the weight savings

because you don't have to have a physical switch.

And having a physical switch,

not only is there the weight of the switch,

but you also have the weight of the wire to the switch,

and you have to have the weight of circuitry that takes that wire

and feeds it into the vehicle computers.

Because of Orion's size, its all-important heat shield

is the largest one ever made,

and new processes were required to manufacture it.

The Orion heat shield has got to be able to withstand landing loads

on the order of 300 to 400 thousand pounds.

Because we're returning potentially from the Moon or beyond

and the flight duration from the time in which you commit to a return

to the time you actually land,

the weather conditions on Earth can be substantially different

or difficult to predict.

And so the Orion spacecraft has to be able to land in the ocean

in a wide range of sea conditions,

wave height, wave slope angle and horizontal winds.

That is what's driven us to a skin stringer architecture that utilizes

a thick laminate composite skin bolted to a titanium sub-structure.

We bond on an ablator, called the Avcoat.

The ablator is the thermal protection part of the heat shield.

The very outside of the ablator actually gets hot enough

that it decomposes, and that's the ablation part of it,

as opposed to an insulator like a shuttle tile.

Then come the ancillary structures and equipment

that will ride with the capsule.

The escape tower, designed and tested,

will pull the capsule away from the main rocket

in the case of an emergency.

Adaptor separation from the rocket's upper stage.

Parachute deployment.

The connecting adaptor to the EMS.

The EMS is the service module attached to the Orion in flight,

supplying oxygen, water, power and heating.

Built by ESA, it is based on their very successful ATV program

which delivered supplies to the ISS.

It'll also provide the main engine thrust for deep space maneuvering.

We have, in particular, a very, very tight schedule in front of us

so everybody's working under high pressure to meet the dates

and this requires a very, very close collaboration.

I see a very motivated team, and so far, as an agency,

we are quite happy with the performance of the European industry.

The US Navy is tasked with retrieving the capsule from the ocean.

At first they train in the pool, then calm waters,

then the Pacific, and finally the real thing.

Experts continue to evolve the process and training

in readiness for the day when a manned flight returns from deep space.

This is the RS-25, the Ferrari of liquid rocket engines

and the main engine from the Space Shuttle program.

Economically re-purposed for the Space Launch System,

four of these engines will power the main stage of the rocket.

The main solid rocket boosters of the shuttle program

also have a renewed life in the SLS.

With another two segments added,

the boosters will thrust for over two minutes.

This project has been a real fun effort in trying to take a heritage booster

that had many, many years of reliability and great performance and evolve it into something bigger and better.

When we first undertook this design

and qualification for the new booster,

part of the mission was to make the booster

more affordable and more modern

and, of course, it had to be completely redesigned for a new mission.

It's a larger booster

and the mission profile is sufficiently different

to where pretty much everything on the inside of the booster is different.

There's well over a thousand individual processes.

Working with our customer, we were able to identify

several hundred areas of improvement.

We've got totally new avionics on this vehicle

versus what we had on Shuttle.

It's state of the art.

Bigger and more powerful than any previous launch system,

the SLS has been under development for some time.

Designing it is one thing, building it another.

In new or refurbished factories and assembly shops,

the body of the largest rocket ever to fly is being constructed one piece at a time.

The massive hydrogen tank takes shape.

The smaller oxygen tank soon follows.

The interim stage for the manned flight is another hydrogen-oxygen motor

supplied by cryo tanks fabricated with new technologies.

So to design and manufacture this tank, we used new materials.

We processed the tank by automatic fiber placement.

The benefit of that is we can lay down the material quickly,

which provides us a low cost operation and a very lightweight tank.

Well, we've worked on this program for 29 months and when we started,

we'd never built a tank of this size by the methods that we did.

We did automated fiber placement and fluted core,

just developing the robotic fiber placement equipment

in a way to make the skirt in one piece was a large challenge.

Each exacting piece is fabricated,

test articles are run through the mill,

vibration tests, vacuum tests, acoustic tests, stress tests.

Nothing is left to chance.

New technology and new materials for a new generation of space exploration.

For this test, there were several things that we looked at.

This was the first time we used those thermal knives

to start the deployment sequence.

And that allowed cuts and tethers,

but then allowed the solar array to deploy.

We wanted to test the locking mechanisms to ensure that it locked properly in space

because anything that could possibly go wrong, we wanted to see tested down here,

so we can ensure, you know, a successful flight.

It's all about technology.

If you don't develop technologies for the future,

you won't go where you want to go.

So composites will decrease the weight of the tanks.

It'll increase the payload performance of the launch vehicle.

It'll give us-- it basically enables things that we don't have today.

Soon the mighty rocket will lift human beings up further

than ever before.

The flight to Mars will be a long one, too long for a crew to sit in a capsule.

A habitat and supplies will also be lifted to orbit and assembled.

Several companies have been selected by NASA to carry out studies

for a suitable system to do the job.

A bit of competition is always good for invention.

Bigelow Aerospace with its Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM,

currently being tested on the ISS,

will develop and test a prototype of XBASE,

a 330 cubic meter expandable habitat.

Boeing of Houston is developing a modular habitat system

that leverages more than 15 years experience in designing, developing,

assembling on-orbit,

and safely operating the International Space Station.

Lockheed Martin will refurbish a multi-purpose logistics module

into a full-scale habitat prototype that will include integrated avionics

and ECLSS.

Orbital ATK will mature the mission architecture and design

of their initial cislunar habitat concept,

based on the Cygnus spacecraft that now supplies the ISS.

Sierra Nevada Corporation's Space Systems will study and refine

a flexible architecture and concept of operations

for a deep space habitat that draws on the lessons

of three to four commercial launches to construct a modular long-duration habitat.

NanoRacks in conjunction with its partners,

Space Systems Loral and the United Launch Alliance,

referred to collectively as the Ixion Team,

will conduct a comprehensive feasibility study

regarding the conversion of an existing launch vehicle's upper stage,

or propellant segment,

into a pressurized habitable volume in space.

So if you're designing spacecraft to be in the Mars orbit,

then the studies we're doing on Space Station can be applied

and help us to design more durable spacecraft for that Martian atmosphere.

MISSE stands for the Materials International Space Station Experiment.

We do study the durability of polymers in terms of their mechanical properties

with radiation exposure.

And we hear a lot about the radiation exposure impact on humans

for flights to, say, Mars,

but polymers and other materials that are used on spacecraft

can also degrade from radiation and that's one of the things I study.

The MISSE experiments do take a bit of time because we do very careful

dehydration measurements of the samples after they've been in space.

What we've found is that the Teflon erosion rate

is highly dependent on the amount of sunlight

and possibly the heating too.

You need to know which of these environments it's gonna be exposed to

because it'll erode at a different rate, depending on the environment.

Assembling spacecraft in orbit

and fueling them for the long journey to Mars sounds simple enough.

On orbit, refueling is anything but simple.

NASA have been developing a system for unmanned refueling for quite some time,

and have a test article onboard the ISS.

We can take a pick-and-place robot,

put the tool wherever we need it to be,

and all it needs to do is drive that tool because the smarts are in the tool.

So, that's what we learned from working on Hubble is

you put a smart tool with the astronauts

and accomplish, you know, both things.

You've got smart tools and astronauts working together.

Now we're putting smart tools with robots and trying to accomplish

the same type of things we did on Hubble.

Aimed at developing capabilities for servicing,

even refueling spacecraft on orbit,

RRM is like doing precise surgery at a distance,

doctor and patient separated by the void and vacuum of space.

It's tough, but the payoff is huge.

Robotics can do things that humans can't do

in terms of precision, in terms of control.

Holding a particular spot for six hours

while engineers on the ground

debate what to do.

We can't ask a human to do that.

The robot is a very stiff, rigid interface.

It's not forgiving, like an astronaut's hand,

so we have to take that into account.

When you push on something really hard with the robot,

you build up really large contact forces.

When the astronaut pushes on something, his wrist might give--

you know, he's got his own internal software compliance running.

But in order to accommodate the robot so we don't break anything,

we have to build features into the tool, features into the software,

just getting the robot to go where you want it to go.

You know, they don't position precisely, so you have to do things like

build lead-in into the tool.

An astronaut can probably just get it right on there because he's right there.

So we do have to do things to make them, you know,

very specific to robotic operation.

We're almost there.

Whoa!

That task successful, next stop Mars.

The first manned mission to Mars will probably only orbit the planet,

checking out all the gear and processes,

even launching communication satellites and finalizing landing sites

in preparation for the next mission,

which will then make the descent to the surface.

And that has a whole new set of problems to overcome.

Unlike the moon, Mars has stronger gravity,

about knot .6 of Earth's,

but it does have an atmosphere where parachutes can be used,

although the atmosphere is very thin and not very deep.

Well, it's a funny thing about Mars,

but if you take the average of the planet,

the average height of everything in the planet,

it turns out that most of the north is two kilometers below that

and most of the south is two kilometers above that.

And it's just, we always land in the north 'cause there's a lot more atmosphere.

If you land in the south, it's like four kilometers less of air

to come to a stop.

In fact, at the altitude of the mountains in the south,

the Mars science laboratory was still supersonic

as it was descending into the crater it was reaching in the north.

Assuming the need to pre-position habitats, supplies

and equipment on the surface prior to humans landing,

NASA and its partners are looking at several solutions.

One is the HIAD or Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator.

This is basically a very large inflatable heat shield,

much larger in area than the payload,

able to slow the craft considerably faster than a standard spacecraft heat shield.

Plans are to test the system on a payload from the ISS,

utilizing a Cygnus resupply spacecraft.

Once lower in the atmosphere, parachutes will further slow the payload

to an altitude low enough for rocket engines to take over.

Morpheus and the Xombie flight systems have matured

over the last few years and are capable of delivering cargo

to a planet's surface autonomously,

avoiding rough terrain or other obstacles without human intervention...

...adding yet another building block to our human effort

to explore the solar system.