How To Fly Orion

NASA’s Orion spacecraft is built to fly autonomously – and on the Artemis I mission, flew 25.5 days uncrewed around the Moon. On Orion’s next flight to the Moon, Artemis II, astronauts will be aboard, and the crew will pilot the spacecraft for the first time. Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover will take control of Orion during a key test called the proximity operations demonstration. Wiseman and Glover will use Orion’s different displays and controls to evaluate the handling qualities of the spacecraft. This is how to fly Orion. Credit: NASA Writer: Erika Peters Editor: Phil Sexton Producers: Rad Sinyak, Erika Peters

What is said in the film

I'm Reid Wiseman. And I'm Victor Glover. And this is how we pilot the Orion spacecraft. What are the differences between piloting an airplane and a spacecraft? I think the thing that I first think about is on a spacecraft, it's really all about attitude.

It's really not about thrust out and getting the airplanes flying faster. And the spacecraft is already going almost 38, 39 times the speed of sound. So we're really controlling the attitude. Where are we pointing? Where are we looking at out the windows, where our antenna and arrays pointing?

The software is the primary flyer of the spacecraft. I think that's the biggest difference, especially for a you know, a pilot coming into this who wants to get on the hand controllers and, and put the aircraft or the spacecraft in its proper attitude. In aircraft, The software is really helping the pilot. And I think now it's almost like we are helping the software. So a couple of the things we're going to do on Artemis II right after liftoff, we are going to detach the Orion spacecraft and service module from the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, which is just a lot of words for our upper stage.

During that, Victor will be physically flying with a rotational hand controller, the translational hand controller, and doing station keeping on this upper stage. This phase of the testing will be to simulate the flying that we would do if we were docking to another spacecraft, like our lander, or to our Gateway. I think we should show you how we actually control the vehicle. So we've been using terms like rotational hand controller, rotational hand controller. We say RHC for short and translational hand controller, THC for short.

In an aircraft you would have a stick and a throttle, but it's the things that you put your hands on to control the spacecraft. We will pitch, roll and yard. Those are the three axes in each direction. And then we will also go up, down, left, right, in and out. And we will assess how precisely that we can control the spacecraft.

But we mentioned earlier that the main controller of the spacecraft is software. And so the main way that we interact with the spacecraft is our cursor control device. Your absolute favorite. I know you love this thing. It looks awkward.

It looks weird. But when you get to use it, it actually a genius piece of gear. And I know it is your favorite. Oh it is. This is our primary way to interact with the spacecraft.

And so what it does is it allows us to determine where we put our focus on the display. So I can move the cursor to a certain display. And then I can move the cursor around to interact with certain fields of data. And it's one of the primary controllers, because there are going to be times when we're under 4G, 8G, maybe even, and we won't be able to lift up our hands and push the buttons on the display. So this is exactly how we will do it.

There is far more information on these displays than we will need to to fly this spacecraft normally. But if a system goes off, if something goes wrong, we can dig down into the lowest levels of the computer. Of all the systems here. And we can take a look to see what's failed. Talk to Mission Control in Houston.

And then right next to the displays you see switches and toggles and dials. And so we call those switch interface panels or SIP panels. If the rotational and translational hand controllers didn't work, we also have a backup to a set of switches. Hi, my name is Jeff Semrau and I work for Lockheed Martin. We're here in the Exploration Development Laboratory, where we do integrated testing and verification of the GNC flight software for the Artemis program.

GNC stands for guidance, navigation and control. Guidance is basically where do we want to go? Nav is where are we? Controls is how do we get where we are, where we want to be. This is the software that interfaces with both the translational and rotational hand controls.

We call this whole stack up the crew and service module or the CSM. That is the crew module, the capsule, the spacecraft Orion, and then the service module made by our partners ESA and Airbus in Europe. And so this is where the thrusters that will maneuver us on the service module. My name is Rachid Amekrane. I am the lead of assembly integration test team of Airbus.

And we built the European service module in Germany. When the astronaut gives the command to go in any direction. The software is steering every thrusters as needed. So it's a balance or a dance between the different engines. So if you provide thrust on one side, you have to counteract it on the other side, every time you touch the translational hand controller or the rotational controller, those thrusters fire.

And those thrusters are right near us and you can hear a bang and it's like, bang, bang, bang, bang. As you're flying this thing around and hear it and feel it. And even though it's quite well shielded and that we're in suits and other things, you're still going to hear and feel those thrusters when they fire. It's pretty neat. I cannot wait until one of us takes controls and just steers this thing around and looks out of the earth.

We'll be farther from the earth than human beings have been in a very long time. Let's go, let's go.

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