"They'll be flying in our baby" says Artemis II spaceship's architect

Despite last-minute setbacks, NASA hopes that the Orion spacecraft will soon take four people on the furthest journey in the history of humankind. In this interview, one of the vehicle's designers explains how it was made.

At the beginning of this week, the Artemis II rocket was sitting on the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida waiting for the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years.

It will now have to wait a little longer than anticipated for liftoff after serious technical issues were spotted, with NASA announcing that the rocket will be crawled back to its Vehicle Assembly Building.

For space fans and the legions of people involved in the Artemis programme it's an agonising development, with the pre-April launch plan now in jeopardy.

One such person is Lockheed Martin engineer Sean ODell who, speaking to Dezeen before this week's news, professed himself to be "painfully excited".

"When you've spent the better part of two decades in pursuit of achieving a singular thing – and flying humans in this is really that thing – yeah, for many of us it's a big personal moment," he said.

"On Artemis II, for a minute, those four astronauts will be the humans that have been the farthest from the surface of Earth in the history of mankind, and they'll be flying in our baby."

ODell is among the huge team at aerospace and defence company Lockheed Martin involved in designing the Orion spacecraft.

At launch, this vehicle sits on top of the 98-metre-tall Space Launch System – the most powerful rocket ever made – and is described by Lockheed Martin as being in a class of its own as a vehicle capable of carrying humans into deep space and back.

Orion has been in development for 20 years at a cost of $31.4 billion, and the eventual Artemis II launch will be its first time transporting human cargo.

Over the course of the 10-day mission, it will slingshot to the far side of the moon before travelling back 24 times faster than a speeding bullet, withstanding temperatures of around 2,700 degrees Celsius as it slices through the Earth's atmosphere to land in the Pacific Ocean.

All that while, unlike the Apollo spaceships of the 1960s and '70s, containing a private toilet and facilities for preparing hot meals.

"Nothing's ever free"

ODell has been working on Orion almost since its inception as part of a team that, at its peak, numbered close to 1,000 people.

Internally, ODell is known as Orion's "architect", but he is not an architect in the conventional sense.

Instead, he is a system architect, whose role is to ensure that the spacecraft balances all of its technical requirements – of which there are around 35,000 in total, encompassing everything from power and weight to lighting and ergonomics.

"It's the effort of coming up with an integrated design that balances all of the competing things that need to all be true simultaneously in order to have a system that can do this mission," he explained.

Sometimes, that effort means tearing things up and starting again. For instance, in the early days of the Orion programme, the intention was for the capsule to touch down on land in order to avoid the corrosive qualities of seawater.

"But we got down the road of trying to land on land and just came to the position where the technology that we needed for that was just too heavy," said ODell.

"And so there was a time when we had to decide that to live within the mass constraints that we have, we had to change to a water landing."

"Nothing's ever free, that's one of the primary principles of this," he added. "I always have to trade something to get something in system design."

To help test these trade-offs the engineers have made extensive use of digital modelling, including in a virtual-reality facility called the Collaborative Human Immersive Lab (CHIL).

They worked with full-scale mockups of Orion to verify that it would be possible to assemble the highly complex web of tubes and wires in the vehicle's belly.

"It's nice to have an actual toilet"

A key priority of the Orion's design is to provide a more comfortable space for its astronauts – its crew module has 57 per cent more habitable space than the Apollo capsule, making it about as roomy as a minivan.

That's because Orion was conceived as a multi-purpose spaceship with the ability to take astronauts on long voyages into deep space.

It is designed to carry a crew undocked for up to 21 days, and to be suitable for bodies from 99 per cent of the human population.

A whole team of engineers, known as Human Systems Integration, is dedicated to working on the ergonomics of the cabin, determining how hand controllers should be placed, and where car-seat style adjustments are necessary.

Then there are the amenities. As well as a suitcase-sized exercise machine – essential in space for preventing bone-mass loss – there is a food warmer and a private "hygiene bay" containing a suction-based toilet and urine hose.

If that doesn't sound particularly appealing, it's better than the bathroom facilities on the Apollo missions, which consisted of plastic bags with an adhesive seal.

"Going back to Apollo, they had pretty rudimentary ways to deal with basic human functions," said ODell. "When you're in a tin can 200,000 miles from Earth, it's nice to have an actual toilet."

The improvements in comfort are partly driven by technological advances that enable these facilities to be packaged more compactly.

"But also, if you're going to be locked in something the size of a small car for a month with three other people, you really need those things to maintain sanity," added ODell.

To that same end, sound is another major consideration.

"There's a lot of stuff in that cabin, and it gets fairly noisy," said ODell. "Again, if you're going to spend a month in there sitting at 110 decibels, that's not going to work too well."

"And so managing cabin acoustics and tamping down things that distribute noise, and being kind of purposeful about how much noise different components can produce, and limiting those – that has become a big thing."

Meanwhile, extensive testing and tweaking was done to arrive at a speaker system that allows the astronauts to hear Houston intelligibly without adding too much weight or consuming too much power.

"Skip on re-entry was synonymous with death"

All of Orion was designed this way, by taking required functions as a starting point, beginning with the big things – such as launching – and gradually drilling down into granular details in what ODell describes as a "wash, rinse, repeat" process.

"You start off not even really talking about the structure or the shape of anything, just: what does it have to do?" he explained.

As it turned out, Orion's basic shape is similar to Apollo's, with the conical crew module sitting on top of a Airbus-made cylindrical service module providing power, water and oxygen.

"Physics is physics," said ODell. "A lot of times people look at the shape of the vehicle and they're like, my gosh, we're where we were in the '60s."

"But that's the shape that works for high-velocity re-entries from deep space. You need broad surfaces that don't heat up when you're coming in at 27,000 miles an hour into the upper atmosphere."

Beyond that almost everything has changed, driven significantly by huge advancements in computer technology.

In a major departure from the Apollo missions, Artemis II will attempt to "skip" its way back into the Earth's atmosphere like a stone skimming on a lake, because it enables greater landing accuracy.

"Back in the Apollo days, skip on re-entry was synonymous with death," said ODell. "You're going to skip off the Earth and go off into the inky void."

"And now, due to our advances in the ability to run powerful software, we skip on purpose as a means of controlling the loads on the vehicle and having some semblance of control over where we're going."

Because of its requirement to travel for longer periods, Orion is also solar-powered rather than hydrogen-fuelled, meaning propulsion is not limited by how much gas can be carried.

The future will see further evolutions of Orion's design. This mission will see Artemis II orbit the moon. NASA's next mission – Artemis III, scheduled for 2028 at the earliest – will see the first human moon landing since 1972.

That will require the addition of a docking system for a lunar lander.

"That's a whole other system that gets put on," said ODell. "It's not just a thing you bolt on the nose, it kind of has tentacles that go into everything."

ODell and his colleagues are also working on integrating a cryogenic freezer into Orion, so that lunar material can be transported back to Earth.

And conversations have already begun about how Orion could factor into a 1,000-day trip to Mars.

"Major, inspiring triumphs, and some tragedies too"

But that is a long way off, and the focus now is on Artemis II.

Some experts have expressed concern about the safety of the mission, after Orion's heat shield returned from the uncrewed Artemis I mission with unexpected damage.

Lurking in the background is the memory of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which broke apart on re-entry in 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board.

NASA has collected all the pieces of the Columbia it has been able to find into a single room at the Kennedy Space Center, intended as a reminder of the consequences of complacency.

"I've been in there a couple times with different groups," said ODell. "And both times it's very emotional to realise that this isn't just moving pictures around in CAD and drawing flow diagrams. It results in systems that somebody's dad and sister and brother are going to fly on."

"It's no secret that the aerospace industry has, in general, been marked by some major, inspiring triumphs, and some tragedies too," he added.

While he's confident in the safety of the mission, when Artemis II does eventually lift off ODell will have his eyes glued to Houston's monitors.

"Definitely as an engineer who has been in the trenches with it you're certainly watching all of the critical events that you've spent hours and months and years sweating over," he said.

"As we go uphill, the fairings that encapsulate the service module pop off – that's a big event that there's a lot of testing for," he added.

"And then even just the solar arrays deploying out, locking into place, that has to work. If they don't get out and click into place, we've got to come home."

"Even though you're completely confident you have all the data, you've done all the testing, there's a mountain of paper that proves that they're going to work, you still sweat those events until you see them happen first time."

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