European Airbus designs powerhouse for NASA spacecraft
New Delhi : The European Airbus has introduced powerhouse for a new Orion Spaceship of NASA. The carrier will take astronauts to the Moon and beyond in coming years, crossing major milestone that should lead to hundreds of millions of euros in future orders.
The 'powerhouse’ has been engineered at Airbus plant in Bremen, Germany. On Thursday, the engineers have carefully packed it into a special container that will fly aboard a huge Antonov cargo plane to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a first step on its way to deep space.
At NASA's space centre, the spacecraft will be connected with the Orion crew module built by Lockheed Martin, followed by over a year of intensive testing before the first three-week mission orbiting the Moon is launched in 2020.
If the spacecraft passes all the tests, then the future production of Orion and the European module could result in billions of dollars of new orders for the companies involved in coming years, said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for human exploration and operations for NASA.
Meanwhile, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has plan to launch a manned mission every year, making the Orion project both politically and economically important at a time when China and other countries are working hard to gain a hold in the space.
Engineers say that Airbus’s European Service Module will provide propulsion, power, thermal control and consumables to the Orion crew module, marking the first time that NASA will use a European-built system as a critical element to power an American spacecraft.
“This is a very big step. The delivery and the flight to America are just the beginning of a journey that will ultimately take us to 60,000 miles beyond the moon, further than any human has ever flown before,” Oliver Juckenhoefel, vice president of on-orbit services and exploration for Airbus, told Reuters.
