z Interview: Julie Kramer White
14 |^
APRIL 2015
AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COMinto another part of the organization
- not a lot of people have heard of it –
it’s called the NASA Engineering and
Safety Center.”
Kramer moved on through the
shuttle program, and is a keen
advocate of the spacecraft, despite its
demise. “I am kind of a shuttle-hugger.
I think they’re magnificent. If it were
up to me and we’d had the bank
account, I would have never retired
them. They serve a totally different
purpose than what we’re able to do
now obviously – the massive amount
they can lift to low earth orbit. To me,
it’s like a truck.
“Do you want to own something
very practical that can get you further,
or do you want to own a truck that can
carry a lot? So I think they [Orion and
shuttle] serve very different purposes,
but also I think in some ways it’s a
shame we don’t have the bandwidth
that we can do both, but we don’t.
The shuttles were aging and they were
expensive to operate and, of course,
we had our experiences with Columbia
that made us nervous perhaps about
the reliability or safety, although I
think they were quite magnificent,
and when you’re sitting on that much
propellant and that complicated a
machine, there’s bound to be issues.
“Orion to me is something very
different; you know, it’s much more
about mass optimization and making it
as light as possible, because that really
governs what you can do with it and
that drives all kinds of things in terms
of development of avionics and
materials. We certainly understand
how to go out into lunar space; I mean
TEST AND CONTRACT OUT
Orion is not just a NASA
space program. As with any
aerospace project, there are
many other subcontractors
who also conduct their own
component trials at varying
levels. Julie Kramer White is
keen to highlight the support:
“We are at prime contractor
level, and then several majors
are underneath. We have so
many avionics boxes that
come from Honeywell; they
typically test the box to meet
specification requirements
and then they pass it to
Lockheed, which integrates
into the spacecraft and then
tests at the spacecraft levelwith us here at NASA in our
facilities. Some testing is
done by the big majors and
some of it is done by
Lockheed. Lockheed makes
the airframe, the heat shield,
things of that nature. It does
the certification and testing
for those components and
then things that are supplied
by the majors – engines and
the boxes that are in the
environmental control
system. So Lockheed
tends to do the component
verification and testing on
the boxes and then we tend
to do the integrated testing.
It makes sense.“We worked with the
Europeans on our solar array
systems because everything
is regenerative power. We’re
working with UTC Aerospace
Systems on our environmental
control life-support systems,
which have to be able to
operate for months at a time
instead of just days, and to be
able to recycle and clean the
atmosphere for longer trips.
“As we move out further,
we’ve got to move more into
a closed ecosystem because
I can’t afford to carry the
consumables for long-duration
missions, so the craft has to
be able to do those things.”5.
The number of hours spent in space
on first test flight in December 201421,
The total mass of Orion
in Kilograms9.
The volume in m3 of habitable
space within the Orion module9.
The maximum pounds of thrust
of ATKs proposed rockets for
Block 2 SLS booster