If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.
“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.
On Episode 104 Jason Hutt, Orion Crew Systems Integrations Lead, explains how the crew is prepared to respond effectively in the unlikely event of an emergency on board the Orion spacecraft at any stage of flight. This episode was recorded on November 20, 2018.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the Official Podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center Episode 104, “In Case of Emergency.” I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we’re bringing the experts, NASA scientist, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know the coolest information about what’s going on right here at NASA. So if you’re familiar with us, you may know that we’ve had a number of episodes about the Orion spacecraft, the one that will be traveling into deep space. We’ve talked about many things, life support, protecting from heat and radiation, maintaining navigation communication, and the propulsion to make the spacecraft go. A large part of the design of all of these parts is, not only making sure that they work, but add adding redundancies so you know that they will work, even if something goes wrong; but what do you do if you have an unexpected leak or a fire in any stage of flight? Well, as you could image, we’ve thought of that too. So today we’re talking about how Orion and its crews will be prepared for every emergency you can think of. We’re talking with Jason Hutt, Orion Crew Systems Integrations Lead; his main role is to make sure that the design of all of the individual components in the Orion cockpit come together as one. In a way where the crew can complete a mission up to twenty one days safely and successfully. Hutt walks us through some of the unlikely events that could happen and how the crew will be able to respond effectively to these sticky situations. So with no further delay, let’s jump right ahead to our talk with Mr. Jason Hutt, enjoy.
[Music]
Host: Jason, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today describing all of these crazy emergencies that could happen on to Orion spacecraft. You’ve probably have a lot of history with space movies then, right?
Jason Hutt: Yes, do I. Quite a bit, yes.
Host: That’s all that it is anymore, right?
Jason Hutt: Oh, sure.
Host: It’s just, all right we’re going to do a movie in space, what could go wrong and how could we make a story about it? That’s your job, right? Your job is thinking about what can go wrong —
Jason Hutt: Absolutely.
Host: But except instead of how could we make a story about it, what could we do to fix it?
Jason Hutt: How do we keep the crew alive and how do we keep them safe so
Host: There we go. Okay.
Jason Hutt: Yeah.
Host: So I guess we’ll start there, what let’s give a broad overview of what kinds of emergencies can happen to the crew on the Orion spacecraft in deep space?
Jason Hutt: Well, we’re looking at really anything that can threaten their lives. So we’re looking at fires — see, you know, we had the Apollo 1 Fire early on in our history, and that’s something that we use — we’ve studied that event to make sure that we don’t repeat something like that. We’ve looked at a leak in the spacecraft, we know there’s been history with the collision with the Mir Program that caused the depress on that, we look at that type of situation, and then there are other medical emergencies and things like that that we need to prepare for, while astronauts are typically the healthiest people on to planet, we still need to prepare for things that are unexpected in those events.
Host: That’s right.
Jason Hutt: That’s a lot of what we prepare for, but there’s also the spacecraft emergencies as well. Think of like, the Apollo 13 style failure where everything goes wrong and how do we get the crew home safely from there.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: I like to think of it a lot as, if you remember there’s a stand out scene there, where Ed Harris is Gene Kranz is at a chalkboard talking about, here’s where we are, this is where we can get to, and we can’t get the crew home from here, and that’s not acceptable, and really, that’s part of my job is to make sure, okay, that that line always goes around the moon and back to earth.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: With the Orion systems so.
Host: Okay. So there’s — I mean, when it comes to emergencies obviously there’s just things that are just going to happen and if they happen here’s what we’re going to do, but you have, sort of, this first line of defense when it comes to Orion, you’re thinking about it ahead of time.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Right? You talked about the history, we have the Apollo 1 Fire, we had collisions events.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: You know, what do we do just avoid those things in the first place and I’m sure there’s a lot on Orion that’s been considered, right?
Jason Hutt: That’s correct. In everything that we do, in our requirements for the design of the systems, we try to minimize the possibilities of these emergencies happening. We look at the materials that the things are made of, making sure that they’re not flammable, we certify every component to certain a percentage of oxygen in the cockpit, do you know what I mean? Apollo 1 Fire occurred in 100% oxygen environment, we don’t operate that way anymore, but we do certify everything to a 40% oxygen environment, so and then even in that, once beyond materials and the selection, we look at the design in the spacecraft and for example, for a lot of the components that are, sort of, behind panels, a lot of the computers and things like that that are actually running Orion, we flow nitrogen over those. By having nitrogen flow over those then they don’t have oxygen available to feed a fire if in a malfunction were to occur.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: So we can do things, even with the layout of the system, just to prevent that emergency from ever happening.
Host: So that’s exactly right, what you’re thinking about is let’s not event make the fire, you know, possible, you’re rating it to a point where it is considered safe enough to fly.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: But even still, you’re thinking about, but what if there is a fire?
Jason Hutt: Right. Because there’s no way we can ever guarantee an emergency won’t happen.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: We look at, again, thinking back to the Apollo 1 Fire, I read the case study on that one, and when we they did the decomposition of how did that actually start, it was a wire underneath the seat that something had rubbed against in the assembling or integration or something like that and the covering had come off of that wire. So no matter how much we prepare for it, we can’t prevent all of these accidents from occurring, and so then it’s, okay, how do we protect it if it does happen? And you do have to protect against mindset of, hey, this could never happen, you know?
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: People like to say that sometimes but our engineers try really hard to make sure that their boxes can never fail on this way, but then I have to annoy them by asking the question, well, what if it does anyway?
Host: Yes, I forget actually, what Apollo astronaut said it, but — I’m going to paraphrase the quote — but it was he was more concerned about what was not thought about —
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Rather than mitigating the assumption, you know, whatever emergency they could think of, they were actually more comfortable with knowing that they at least thought about it.
Jason Hutt: And that’s how I kind of view this, you know, going back to your original question on movies, you know, think about the movie, “The Martian”
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: And what does he do in that? He goes, the main character in that, as these problems occur he goes and he looks at what does he have and how can he make it work. And it’s not about what everything was designed to do, it’s what you can do with the things that you have.
Host: So it’s making sure that when we are going out into deeper space, especially in the Orion spacecraft, the crew’s going to have what they need —
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: to survive and of course, the spacecraft itself the first line of defense, right?
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: You already said you’re rating it, you’re making sure the materials are going to be more fire proof, that the environment itself, the compositions of the air inside is going to be rated to an acceptable level because, like you said, 100% oxygen, too flammable you can’t do that.
Jason Hutt: Right. And, you know, the other key piece there is Orion, as a whole, the system is designed to be single fault tolerance, so that it’s as one key component fails we have a back up that will come online, an identical back up in some cases.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: Then for a few key things like, communication, the main vehicle computers, we have back — entirely different backup systems that don’t necessarily have the same functionality or capability, but they’re there for survival capabilities so that if we have — so for example, we have two strings of our communication systems, so basically we have two sets of boxes that are redundant for us to communicate through satellite that work down to the ground, but if we have some kind of failure that takes out both of those strings, as we call them, then we have a completely separate redundant system that the crew can use, has a limited capability, but it still would allow them to communicate with the ground. So and for those, we call those survival capabilities, they don’t necessarily, they’re not as robust as some of our main systems, but they’re intended to help keep the crew alive and to get back home.
Host: It’s to at least have something.
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: Right? Because the alternative is to have these two redundant systems, but then nothing backing that up.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: But then one other piece of my job is also ask the question, if the crew doesn’t have any help from the ground, can they still get home? So even beyond that redundancy we still have some discussions of how could they make this work, and we do protect for providing the crew with enough information that if they’re not able to communicate with the ground in anyway, that they can still make it home safely.
Host: It must be a nightmare inside your head, you’re just thinking about all the different things that could possibly go wrong.
Jason Hutt: All of these situations are pretty tricky, there are — you know, this summer — this year we’ve gone through about six months of pulling teams together and for — we would bring in the engineering teams, medical teams, Navy representatives for retreating the crew in the ocean, we’ve talked with the astronaut office, the opts team and then every component has its own designer, we bring all those people together and we talk through these scenarios and try to figure them out end to end. It is — there are a lot of great minds who are working together on these things.
Host: That’s incredible.
Jason Hutt: Yeah.
Host: Well, let’s keep going with some of the Orion first line of defense stuff.
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: We’ve already talked about fireproofing, we talked about some of the — how the communication systems are redundant, but then you’ve got a back up, what else is already in the design of Orion to make sure that they’re going to be safe in the first place?
Jason Hutt: We do have micrometeorite protection, you know, we haven’t really talked a little bit about —
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: — potential leaks.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: So they’re, you know, on the service module, you have the multilayered instillation, the — we have basically Kevlar inside the shell of the service module, the tile protection system on Orion Is sized to a certain height to help prevent a micrometeorite impact and breakthrough into the cabin, so we have those types of protections as well, and then I think I’ve already mentioned most of the big picture redundancy, and things like that, where we have back up computers and things so.
Host: So these are already part of the design, you know, you have — the essential idea is you have the thing that you’re protecting against, fire, micrometeorites, right? And then you have things to back that up just in case something goes wrong. You’re thinking a couple levels down, right? What if this goes wrong, what if the two strings start — both fail, then that third back up string also fails, now how are they communicating? Let’s go there, once — let’s go to some of these things have failed, how about we starts with fires.
Jason Hutt: Okay.
Host: Since we’ve at least started with that; all of these, you know, you’ve designed the materials inside to prevent fires, the environment itself, but now there is a fire, what is the crew doing?
Jason Hutt: So for a fire response, one thing that we look at first is that we expect that this is going to be a rapidly evolving situation, so we expect that the crew is going to need to be able to take action without any assistance from the ground. So the fire response is going to be failure system, Orion is fairly small, this isn’t like ISS where you have to go hunting around and I worked as an instructor on ISS for about five years in a training league for three years and we trained — part of it was training crews on emergencies. So in that case, you have lots of time, you have lots of volume, Orion’s very small, as soon as they see smoke, first thing that is going to happen is either the vehicle will protect the fire, via the smoke detector that we have in the cabin or the crew can push a button on their control panel to enunciate the fire, and that will immediately start shutting some systems down, it’ll stop air circulation, so that hopefully we stop providing the fire with oxygen; and then immediately what they’ll do is go get the fire extinguisher, we have a water based fire extinguisher in Orion, and then what we have done is we’ve reviewed all the potential fire sources and then we picked out what we thought was the fire source of greatest concern, and that’s our — what we call our “design to fire” for Orion, what we picked is the lithium ion battery in a computer that the crew is using, in a portable computer that the crew is using in the cockpit, that would be our — that is our fire source of greatest concern.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: So all of our systems are designed to that, and part of the reason that’s our fire source of greatest concern is that the lithium ion battery, if it were to catch fire, and you may remember there were a series of news articles or news occurrences were there were some phone batteries that were catching on fire.
Host: Lithium ion batteries?
Jason Hutt: That’s the lithium ion battery —
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: — that we’re talking about and I think it ultimately came down to a manufacturing defect in those batteries.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: So that’s the type of thing that we’re talking about here, and the reason we picked it is because it generates a whole lot of heat and it also generates a lot of toxic chemicals that are then byproducts of that fire. So the crew’s immediately going to grab their water based fire extinguisher and then they’re going to empty their fire extinguisher on to that lithium ion battery, and in order to adequately put out the fire they’re going to discharge all of the water that’s in that fire extinguisher. And we need that, it has to be water for a lithium ion battery fire because those fires get really hot and you need a phase exchange, basically the water turning into steam, into water vapor, to help dissipate the heat from the fire. So they’re going to put that out right away. Now, the fire itself turns into — generates some really nasty byproducts and we’ve done some firebox testing at Glenn — in correlation with Glenn Research Center where we burned up some of the these batteries and then we’ve evaluate what comes off of those; and one of the chemicals that’s introduced it’s called acrolein and has a very — it has a tear gas like effect on the crew member, it causes burning in the eyes, stinging, and it can be very toxic for the crew. So while one crew member is most likely discharging the fire extinguisher on the fire, other crew members are going to be grabbing the contingency breathing apparatus, it’s basically a hood that the crew member can put on that’ll have some filters in it that’ll allow them to breathe safely and they’ll put that hood on. Now, hopefully, in that short span of time, maybe about three, or four or five minutes between noticing that you have smoke coming off the laptop, discharge the fire extinguisher, and put on the gas mask, hopefully at that point you’ve put it out. Now, now if it’s something that it’s not in the open cabin, if it’s a piece that’s behind the panel, Orion is a little bit different than past vehicles, ISS, you have fire extinguishers designed to be a discharge behind those panels, we don’t necessarily have that, but, like I said before, we’ve tried to – we’ve flown nitrogen over our computers to make sure they don’t catch fire.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: But if they do, crew could remove a panel, discharge the fire extinguisher behind the panel, if necessary.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: But hopefully, if we ever have a fire, it’s not going to be behind one of those panels, it’ll be out in the open cabin.
Host: Right. It’s one of those — it has to get through these several layers of defense first.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: It’s got to be you know the design of the equipment itself, the nitrogen flowing over it.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: There’s a lower probability of catching fire in the first place, but what if it does? That’s where you’re at right now.
Jason Hutt: And we’ve tested those computers to show and shown that if a fire does start in that computer, it usually burns itself out.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: So, again, it would have to be — something else would have to catch fire with it in order for that fire to propagate and get worse in the cabin.
Host: Low probability of the something
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: — getting to that point which is why — that’s your risk.
Jason Hutt: Right. As opposed to a fire in the open cabin.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: Where you have clothes of the crew members, maybe you have a paper from something that they’re working on, there’s more fuel that could be consumed in a fire in the open cabin than there is behind some of these base.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: And obviously, you know a lot of teams working on this, assessing this and figure out that yes, there is a risk of that, but it’s so low that we can feel comfortable designing it in this fashion.
Jason Hutt: Right, but we still have the capability to respond in some form or fashion.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: You can’t have the hubris of saying, this’ll never happen.
Host: Never happen.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Yeah [laughter]
Jason Hutt: So —
Host: Yeah, it seems like that’s a huge part of Orion, is you can even tell, as we’re discussing now, a lot of this is the redundancies, a lot of the space being taken up, you know, is not only redundant systems, but emergency systems. Right?
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: You have gas masks packed, ready to go just in case something happens. So what other kinds of emergencies, we get through these several layers of already the defense of Orion, how about a leak, what if a leak were to have happened?
Jason Hutt: So a leak is a really challenging one.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: Right? And this is really — starts getting into some of our worst case scenario. Back in the constellation era, prior to becoming the Orion program, they made a decision for how large a hole could we protect for? And what we — and what the community came to a conclusion was, a quarter inch hole, a quarter inch diameter hole in the Orion cabin, is really the largest hole that the vehicle could sustain and safely reenter the atmosphere, in terms of plasma reentry into the vehicle, and not destroying the vehicle. So once we figured that out, we used that to size all of our systems to — okay, how do we provide enough air so that we can keep the crew alive, how do we provide a means to keep the crew alive for a quarter inch hole in the cabin? Now, the first question we have to answer is, what are they going to be in? How do they survive, and what we have is our pressure suit, we have our Orion Crew Survival System which is our — the orange suit that we are developing for Orion that becomes, in essence a smaller spacecraft for the reminder of the mission, and the key thing that we had to figure out was, how long do we have to protect for, we’re going to the moon. You know, there was — in that — back to that Apollo 13 scene where they — Ed Harris drew the X on the chalkboard they had the question of, okay, do we come right home or do we go around the moon and come home?
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: Well, we’ve looked at that as well, we’ve been trying to answer that question, and basically we have a cutoff point where we say, okay, at this point we’re going to just do a free return versus this point we’re going to come directly home. If we do the free return we’re looking at about 120 hours to come home, and then we’ve added to that, a day of margin, so we say — we have our design to the length of the 144 hours to get the crew safely home.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: For a quarter inch hole in the cabin. So if I take those two parameters then I can go design my systems for how do I protect for that, from a crew members perspective; and I’m talking about we have to protect for four crew members to be live inside of suits, inside of their pressure suit for 144 hours, while of the rest of the vehicle is at vacuum.
Host: Oof.
Jason Hutt: Yes, so that is a very difficult design challenge, and our team has been working on that very hard over the last many years, and we’ve finally come to a point where we have most of the things worked out. Now, if you think of yourself you’re going to be inside of a suit, you know, you go scuba diving or a crew member who go out for EVA’s now, we don’t do that for longer than eight hours for an ISS space walk. Now, we’re really talking about you’re going to have to have systems for all of your biological functions for six days.
Host: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hutt: So that means protecting – we need a means of giving you food and water and we need a means of collecting waste and we need the means of making sure that waste doesn’t cause to you get sick where an infection would develop and causes the crew member to die because of that infection. And those have been some really tricky challenges and it’s all been designed by separate teams and now coming in together in kind of a holistic system where — there’s really — to say graciously, we have a fecal collection bag that the crew member would actually — that two crew members would help each other, they will get suited, and they will glue a bag that will collect poop for 144 hours.
Host: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: That’s — well, that’s the way you got to do it, I guess, right?
Jason Hutt: That’s the way you’ve got to do it. So what happens is — and let me back up a second. Once we have that quarter inch hole in the cabin, the crew has basically one hour, after that leak to get into their spacesuits and to make sure that they are holding pressure and that’s how much air or gas that Orion can provide before we start dropping below a limit that would be hazardous to their health. So they have thirty minutes to get the suit on and they have thirty minutes to do leak checks to make sure that suits are holding pressure, and then we start just living in those suits. So you have thirty minutes where you’re going to strip off your clothes, you’re going to attach this other hardware, we have a system for fecal collection and we have a system for urine collection. Then you’re going to quickly get your suit on, there’s probably — there’s a couple of other things in the cabin that you probably need to go and configure as well because it’s going be hard to do it with — inside of your suit, then you’re going to get that suit on and that thirty minute mark, we have to have that first crew member starting their leak check and then from there, we do them all serially. We do one crew member at a time, that way if one crew member fails when they get added, we can quickly tell, okay, this crew member has a problem with their suit configuration, we need to go correct that really quick and then try again. So it’s really going to be a time critical event, there’s not going to be any time for modesty in that scenario, it’s your life is danger you need to respond as quickly as possible.
Host: You’re in emergency mode.
Jason Hutt: You’re in emergency mode.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: And now, the reason we have to do things like that, fecal skin contact; if — if you have a baby, you know a diaper rash can develop if the baby’s not clean. Well, this is the same type of concept, a crew member, you’re going to be inside a suit, you’re not going to be able to take that suit off for six days, you can’t exactly throw anything out, so we need to make sure that we try at least to prevent that contact, and we do that with we have a barrier cream that is inside the bag, that gets applied to the crew member as they’re putting on the bag, and that cream in the bag then help keep the crew isolated from skin contact, and even the food is designed to produce less waste after your body processes it. Yes, it’s considered to be, what we call “low residue diet”
Host: There you go. Okay. Not something you want on a normal situation.
Jason Hutt: No, yeah.
Host: But yeah, in an emergency situation I could see why. There’s engineering challenges with it.
Jason Hutt: The consensus of our community, this is really a worst case scenario.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: This is not going to be a pleasant scenario for anybody involved, but the goal is keep you alive in this situation where you otherwise wouldn’t be alive.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: So, you know, one other thing that I’ll mention there from a urine point of the view that the urine breaks down into ammonia. One of the design challenges that the team had to come up with, is how do you keep that ammonia out of the suit? Because once all four crew members are in their suits, they’re all sharing the same atmosphere, they’re all connected to the system, and so any gas that gets introduced in one suit is shared by — will be disseminated through all of them, so we had to have ammonia isolated from the suit, and so essentially, we have a tube that comes out of the suit that connects to a tank, and then that tank connects to a valve that they can then vent overboard. There’s two chambers in the tank, one that is exposed to the crew member, one that’s exposed to space, and basically they — once you have the urine in the tube, you expose it to the vacuum, and that gets expelled into space.
Host: Oh, okay. So this is even in the suit, there’s still this system?
Jason Hutt: That’s right. This system is built into the suit. For food and water we have a port in the helmet where the crew members will be able to fill up a drink bag from the Orion water tank, they insert a straw through the helmet and they can drink the water that’s inside of that bag. Food, it’s more of a liquid diet at that — in that case, but we do have four flavors: Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and banana.
Host: Okay. At least it’s favored.
Jason Hutt: They have, yes. So four liquid foods and that goes through the same portal in the helmet. Now there’s one piece that we’re still working on and that’s medicine delivery to the crew members. In this scenario, there’s a possibility for infections, there’s a possibility for high anxiety, there’s a possibility for lack of sleep; we would like to be able to have the option at least to give the crew members medications to help with those different types of medical issues, and we’re still working out what’s the best way for us to deliver medicine into the suit while maintaining the efficacy of the medicine, so making sure that it works as intended for the different body types, body sizes of the crew members. [Editor’s Note: Hutt reports this issue has been resolved. Medicines will be selected in pill form so they can fit through a port on the helmet.]
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: Yeah.
Host: And just to — just to circle back on this, the worst case scenario would be a leak at a point where you have to live in a suit for how much time?
Jason Hutt: One hundred and forty four hours, six days is what we’re design to.
Host: Six days.
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: Okay. So a leak can happen at, you know, any point in the mission, but in the worse position would be you’d have to do that for six days?
Jason Hutt: That’s right, six days out.
Host: Which makes sense on why you would want to have the things like medicine, the things like all of these systems.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Because ultimately, it’s the crew’s survival at that point. That’s what mode you’re in.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Okay. I could see why of the emergencies, this is one of the more difficult ones is the leak, where you have to do this and this and this.
Jason Hutt: Right. Where you essentially have to create a second spacecraft.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: And you’re going to set up the human body so that you can’t touch it for the next six days.
Host: Okay. Yeah, so — but the system itself is I mean — okay we’re going back to Orion, Orion is obviously designed to make sure that it can withstand a decedent amount of —
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Micrometeoroid impact or whatever else may cause a leak and a quarter inch is a decedent size of a hole, right?
Jason Hutt: I mean, if you’ve seen the pictures of the recent hole in the Soyuz I mean, that’s — I don’t remember what the exact diameter of that was –
Host: Like 2 milimeters.
Jason Hutt: — but that’s pretty, that’s — it’s close to what we were talking about here.
Host: Okay. Yeah. Okay.
Jason Hutt: And unfortunately, that becomes a tradeoff, you know, we’d love to be able to protect for everything, but I think the last week or excuse me — in the Apollo episode it was mentioned that, you know, mass is one of things they were constantly trading off, well, mass is what we tradeoff in the sizing of the system. So we’d love to be able to protect for everything like cost and mass are really two drivers that say, okay, well, we can only go this far with what we have.
Host: It’s always a consistent theme when we talk about Orion.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Is the mass constraints.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Because everyone — you know, emergency stuff is just one topic that we can talk about, but we’ve talked about exercise equipment, we’ve talked about food, we’ve talked about — I mean, there’s a lot of things that people were trying to cram into this tiny space.
Jason Hutt: That’s right. That’s right. And that even goes that’s before we get to the science experiments that we know we’re going to fly and to want do inside of Orion.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: It’s just the basic systems they need the live in and response and stay alive and so —
Host: Right. Exactly. Okay. So a lot of — we talked about fires, we talked about the possibility of a leak, these are some of the — you know, definitely one of the larger emergencies that could happen in space what else, what else can happen?
Jason Hutt: So one of the other things that we’re protecting for is the radiation event.
Host: Radiation event.
Jason Hutt: Basically a radiation storm — I’m not going to — I’m not a radiation expert, so I might use the wrong term there, but we basically have our radiation team to have taken data from a worse case radiation event, it was a 1972 event that they’ve used to, sort of, model the worst case radiation environment for us to design to. In that instance if we were to have a radiation event similar to that, we have built into Orion a radiation shelter, and then a concept from an operation standpoint of how we would configure the vehicle to minimize the crews’ exposure to that radiation. Basically we have — we have two — the key for radiation detection is to put as much mass between you and the radiation as possible. So we’ve got a spot that is really central in the Orion cabin in our locker system, a stowage system that we have on what we call the floor of the vehicle, there’s two large lockers, they’re roughly two feet wide by about two-three feet deep, by about three feet-four feet long. Those two boxes are large enough — and we’ve done the testing — were large enough for two people to get in each one and sit and in at least in a one g environment the crew members sit typically and sit face to face, and they would sit in those boxes and then what else the crew is going to do is they’re going the take all of the stuff that’s in the lockers, that was in the lockers, and they’re going to basically build what I like to call a “pillow fort” around themselves to try and put as much mass between them and radiation source.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: And then they’re going to take some things in there, they’re going to take some food, they’re going to take their laptops, they’re going to take some umbilicals so that they can have air circulation, and they’re going to stay in this what we call, this radiation shelter for up to 24 hours for this event. Yes, it’s another one of those where you’re going to be very good friends —
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: — with your locker buddy. [Laughter] So, you know, and then — but that will keep them safe, and then we’ve already got the analysis to show that this will minimize their exposure to really the harmful effects of radiation and should prevent anything close to and, kind of, sort of, severe radiation sickness or anything like that so.
Host: I think I — I think I know the high level of the 1972 event and we weren’t flying at the time, but I think if we were the crew would have — I think — I don’t think they would have survived that event, from what I understand.
Jason Hutt: Yeah, I don’t — I have to say that I’m not entirely familiar with some of the radiation protection designs in the past, but we definitely understand a lot better now.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: And it’s something where now we’ve got this — but it’s intended for your beyond the earth’s magnetic field.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: This is really a capability for deep space exploration, and to make — for going out beyond the earth’s magnetic field, when you’re going to be more exposed it’s a concept and it’s a concept that we can apply to future vehicles as well.
Host: Okay. Yeah.
Jason Hutt: So.
Host: So, yeah, the idea — the central idea is that during a radiation event, you want the most mass in between you.
Jason Hutt: That’s correct.
Host: The radiation shielding, I think we did an episode a little bit about radiation shielding, and basically the biggest radiation shield, at least from a systems perspective, was redundancy.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: As we were talking about.
Jason Hutt: Right. Right.
Host: But from a crew perspective, yes, it’s more mass. I guess, yeah, you’re hanging out in a space suit for a leak event, you’re hanging out in a box for a radiation event.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: These are definitely some of the toughest folks —
Jason Hutt: Yes, they are.
Host: — going out on these missions.
Jason Hutt: Psychologically.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: As well as physically.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: So yeah.
Host: Okay. Radiation event, we have — we have leaks, there’s a lot of these that are happening in space, right?
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: There’s a lot of things can happen, even after the mission is quote on quote “done” you’ve reentered the earth’s atmosphere, you’re still not done.
Jason Hutt: No, you’re not, you’re not done until that crew is safely out of that spacecraft.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: And into the care of — at this point, the Navy who would be pulling them on into their ship and into any medical care there for any post flight medical treatment they would need; but, yes we have — one of the other things that we have looked at is, you know, splashdown, the entire descent sequence, it’s a violent sequence, the splashdown exerts a lot of force on the vehicle, we try to minimize it from a crews perspective, but that’s still there. So we still look at, what if you have a leak of — the two most harmful substances we have are ammonia or hydrazine, hydrazine being the fuel for the thrusters on the crew module and then ammonia being the gas that we use from a cooling perspective for our systems on Orion, especially after service module separation.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: So we look at what happens if we have either those are ingested during descend, so Orion is designed such that we never want more than one psi delta, one psi difference between the outside atmosphere and the inside atmosphere to protect the structure. So if we were to come in at a lower pressure, let’s say, nine and a half psi, which is the bottom edge of our nominal or normal operating range, as we would descend lower and the air pressure goes above that, then we have a valve that would open up and the air would come in. Now if that happens at a point when a thruster is fired or depending on — you could potentially either get ammonia or hydrazine ingestion, ammonia ingestion is a lot more likely as hydrazine should pass through the propulsion system and be converted to ammonia, but you could get an ingestion. So if something like that happens, after the capsule splashes down, depending on if it’s upright or not, Apollo landed upside-down roughly 50% of the time. So we know that we will sometimes land upside-down, we have an up righting system that will bring the capsule to an upright position, but that is expected to take around four minutes, maybe seven minutes, once the capsule uprights, the crew as a gas analyzer that’s going to be mounted off to the left of one of the crew members, and they’re going to be able to look at that and say, okay, do I have ammonia in the cockpit? If there’s ammonia in the cockpit, it gives them a visible alarm, and then their job is to get out of the spacecraft as quickly as possible while they’re on these suits — while they’re in their suits; and then we have on the suit there’s a small air supply, there’s a ten minute air supply with small bottles that are actually strapped to the legs of each crew member, and they would switch over to that air supply, as they get out of the spacecraft, and then either into their own survival raft or into the raft that Navy forces, who are hopefully waiting right there to pick them up.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: So.
Host: So this is the event — in a normal landing, you’d still be wearing your pressurized suit just, you know, for safety reasons.
Jason Hutt: Correct.
Host: Just in the normal procedure, but that designed in the suit are emergency features.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: That’s right. We will always have the crew members suited and have done make sure that those suits are holding pressure in the event that something happens during reentry where we would have loss of cabin pressure or we’d get a harmful substance in there because the reality is during that entire descend phase, which you’re really talking about a twenty minute phase of the mission, crew can’t do anything except stay seated and strapped into the vehicle. So we don’t — if there is a malfunction that occurs or anomaly that occurs during that descend, we want them already to be prepared and in a position where they’re going to be protected. So they have that, they’re connected to the vehicle’s systems for the entire descend sequence, and then we have a separate, very small system that’s really only intended to give them enough air to get out of the spacecraft after they splash down. Now, we all know that as the crew readjusts to normal gravity, they’re — it’s more difficult to move, and they, may be moving a little more slowly, our system is designed to allow the crew members to get out within three minutes after splashing down in the ocean, but we provide them ten minutes worth of air. You know, they’re going to have a rush of adrenaline at that point, they’re going to know that they’re in a potentially harmful situation.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: And they’re going to make their best effort to get out of the spacecraft as quickly as possible.
Host: And I guess, is a — you said, there’s going to be two rafts that they could possibly jump out on to, one of them is the normal raft, the Navy’s there, ready to pick them up, the other one sounds like it’s an emergency raft.
Jason Hutt: Correct.
Host: Okay. So that’s part of it too?
Jason Hutt: Yes, what we really protect them for is to — you know, we hope, we would always come down off the coast of San Diego and the Navy forces are nearby to pick up the crew in as much as two hours after they splash down. Now we don’t expect it will always take that long, we’re still working about exactly how long it will take.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: But we also protect for — if there’s a failure of our systems and we come down off target or if we have to land early or if we end the mission early or if we have a launch abort and the capsule lands in the ocean and the Navy is not present and it could — we protect for up to 24 hours in the command modules, as kind of a lifeboat in the ocean waiting for help to arrive. So we have to provide all of those systems as well, and that’s where you get into the raft that they could deploy on their own if the Navy wasn’t there.
Host: Okay. Yeah, they do — they must do a lot of testing, when it comes to Orion, not only just working Orion itself, but going through all of these emergency situations.
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: Wow.
Jason Hutt: And we do a testing piece part, you know, we test out some of the components on their own, we’ve done some testing of the life raft and things like that, at a wave pool at Texas A&M and some of our —
Host: A wave pool?
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: Wow.
Jason Hutt: Well, we’ve got to make sure —
Host: You got to simulate everything.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: As much as we can. We’ve done some firebox testing where we take tablets and laptops and we put them in and we burn them up and see what comes off of them and then test our filters to make sure they’re removing everything.
Host: Okay. Okay. Yeah.
Jason Hutt: So we do that piece part testing. Now we’re going to do tests to make sure the crew members could put on a suit in thirty minutes, that’s going to be a very critical one for us.
Host: Oh, yeah?
Jason Hutt: Yeah, we can’t test all of these things, you know, in — in — we don’t want to expose people to some of these chemicals, we don’t want to —
Host: That makes sense.
Jason Hutt: Yeah, put them in a suit for six days. So —
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: So, you know, we test them in piece parts and then we try to do some analysis to show, okay, we have enough oxygen, we have enough capacity, and things like that to show.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: We will do some demonstrations during the missions, we’re talking about for the radiation shelter, putting that together on EM2 just to demonstrate how feasible, how quickly can they get that assembled, that’ll allow us, does the configuration actually work or do we need to provide some additional restrains to help the crew members in this scenario or do we need to come up with a different concept altogether.
Host: Wow.
Jason Hutt: So —
Host: Again, it must be a nightmare inside your head [laughter]
Jason Hutt: There are lots of continuances that we have to take for, but it’s not nearly all me, you know, we have a — it’s a large team who are working on these things, so I get a lot of help from a lot of different areas. You know, we’ve got fifty years of human space flight experience to pull from.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: We’ve tried to use those lessons learned wherever we can. You know, I’ve been here coming up on twenty years, seventeen of that was on the ISS program, and like I mentioned, a lot of that was in emergency, a big chunk of that was in emergency training and so you use a lot of the lessons That we learned — have learned over time about crew ordination and crew protection. You feed that into this and every time we do this we get better at it as we figure out, okay, this — we learn more lessons and then apply those to our designs.
Host: There you go. Like I said, it’s going be a tough crew that’s going to go an Orion, they should feel pretty good about all of the knowledge that’s going into all of these systems.
Jason Hutt: I hope so. And we work closely with the crew office too.
Host: Okay. That’s good. What else, I guess, what else could happen after the mission is done, you said there could be a hydrazine or ammonia leak even after landing, post landing fire? What else could happen?
Jason Hutt: Well, and the other thing we looked at, we do look at the post landing fires.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: I didn’t talk about a hydrazine leak, one of the things that we protect for — so when the raft — when the spacecraft splashes down, there will still be some hydrazine in its propeller tanks. Hydrazine is actually the most dangerous substance that we have on the spacecraft and very small amounts can kill a person. That’s a system where if we landed harder than we expected and you ruptured a tank then that’s another one where if you had that detected inside the spacecraft, you would to want get out as quickly as possible. We do, as I said a moment ago, we are protecting for staying in the crew module up to 24 hours.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: Post splashdown. If there’s a fire in that timeframe we still want to crew to be able to respond to it. Now, again the, if the fire’s bad enough they evacuate to their raft.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: That’s what they would do.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: If the fire is manageable, if they’re able to — they can still use their water based fire extinguisher to extinguish the fire, they can then open up a an air path and turn on a fan that would cycle the cabin atmosphere and give them clean atmosphere to breathe in that situation. So now that depends on the severity, I’m always going to fall back to if it’s a bad enough fire, if they feel like they’re losing control of the situation, they get out of that raft, and like I said before, we’ve designed it, so it should take them at most three minutes to get out of that spacecraft.
Host: Okay. Another one of those things where there’s a lot of checks to make sure that’s not going to happen in the first place.
Jason Hutt: Correct.
Host: But worst case scenario is it does.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: You have to plan for that.
Jason Hutt: Right. And I think in that case you’re talking about the entire vehicle’s going to be packed, if you have a fire it’s probably going to be behind a panel somewhere and it’s going to be a little bit harder to find, and that’s where, okay, you go, you get in your raft, and you can survive in the raft, we also account for surviving in the raft for up to — to meet that 24 hour mark.
Host: Oh.
Jason Hutt: So.
Host: Okay. Great.
Jason Hutt: We actually have a crew survival kits, which are — so right near the hatch for Orion, just to the left of the hatch, are the raft itself, and then we have two survival kits; in those survival kits are 24 hours of water for the crew members, some basic first aid materials, and there will be a radio, a search and rescue radio that is then a beacon to signal the Navy forces and talk with any rescue forces that come in.
Host: Nice.
Jason Hutt: There’s also some exposure protection, a sheet, a blanket even sometimes you see those — that tinfoil survival —
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: — blankets. Well, we’ll have something similar there to help protect the crew from exposure in that situation.
Host: Okay. Wow. Yeah, I guess, as you’re going through, you know, we’re talking about all of these nightmare scenarios, really, just things that can go wrong, but as you describe the mitigation strategies, I think you could feel pretty good. I mean, these are — the idea is that these are relatively unlikely scenarios.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: But even if they were to occur, you’d be fine and with modern technologies like, beacons and, you know, GPS.
Jason Hutt: GPS, right.
Host: I’m assuming even if you do land in the middle of the ocean, like, we can find you.
Jason Hutt: That’s the key, right?
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: Is that we have capabilities to signal, and we have both a satellite phone in the vehicle and we have the search and rescue radio, which is good for line of sight communication. It will have a GPS capability, there will be a text capability, they could actually text people.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: So hopefully if we ever get into one of these situations they’re in a good position, they can talk to the Mission Control, they can talk to the rescue forces that are coming from the Navy, and have good communication, or if we were to come down really off target, I think the worst case scenario in that is landing somewhere, let’s say, the Indian Ocean where we know would take longer than 24 hours, we’re developing protocols for contacting what we call, “a ship of opportunity” which would be a passing ship either from an allied Navy or even a private ship and for the crew to be able to signal them and for us to able to give that ship of opportunity enough information to help them get the crew on board, and then give the crew enough information so that they could secure the crew module before leaving it in the ocean and getting on to that ship.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: So that — so we’re — we try to think of all the different scenarios, at least come up with a protocol for how we would approach it.
Host: Right.
Jason Hutt: Yeah.
Host: Yeah, worst case scenario, unlikely, but you’re going to land so far away —
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: — that we can’t get to you in time. The safest option is that someone else is going to get to you.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: So a lot of this is, you know, we talked about the crew, especially.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: The crew, the crew suppressing the fire, the crew getting into the — how much is Mission Control involved in some of the emergency procedures?
Jason Hutt: So Mission Control is going to help with the vehicle configurations.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: Whenever — especially with — you know, if we go back to the fire scenario for a fire in space, one of the things that happens is we isolate the system that removes carbon dioxide, and we do that because of the absorbent material that’s going to remove that carbon dioxide could get poisoned by some of the byproducts of the fire. So as soon as we get to a point where the fire’s out and the crew is starting to clean back up again, well, we’ve got four crew members that CO2 is going to be building up — that carbon dioxide’s building up in the cabin, so we need to be able to remove that again. Well, the ground team is going to be looking at, okay, well, what’s our best option for reconfiguring our system to restore carbon dioxide removal capabilities? So that’s how they will help for some of these on orbit cases. They’re also going to be running the analysis, say, okay, how much air — how much oxygen do we have for the scenario where they’re in the suit for up to six days? Can we repressurize the cabin? You know, when we have a leak in the cabin as the difference between the pressure in the suit grows and the pressure in the cabin grows it becomes harder for the crew to move; well, we have enough air on Orion that as we get closer to reentry and the crew’s got to move around to pack the vehicle or strap themselves in the seat, we can repressurize that, and the ground team’s going to be figuring out, okay, how much time can we give the crew with a repressurized cabin, which is essentially how much time can we feed a quarter inch leak and keep the pressure at a point where the crew can move around easily? And they’re going to be running those calculations, they’re going to be providing that information to the crew.
Host: Wow.
Jason Hutt: So it’s — yes, they — it is a critical role to assist the crew as much as possible.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: And then that’s the mission team or the — excuse me — the configuration of the systems, you’ve also got the medical teams; and, you know, we’re going to have — we’re going to be in contact with the crew as much as possible in those scenarios, being evaluating their condition psychologically, evaluating their condition physically, providing any recommendations or advice we can to them, in terms of medications or any other procedures. You know, if we have a medical emergency on board, I know that’s one of the things we haven’t really talked about, but if there’s a heart attack or something worse, we have a medic kit that’s on Orion, we’ve evaluated how would you restrain a patient say, how would you — we’re in the process of evaluating how would you administer CPR, and then, again, what capability, what communication, what video can we give to the doctors that are on the ground, the flight surgeons that are on the ground, so that they can see what condition the crew is in and provide the crew with some guidance.
Host: Yeah, that’s huge, having the eyes and ears of trained doctor.
Jason Hutt: Absolutely.
Host: At least connecting remotely.
Jason Hutt: Absolutely.
Host: In an emergency situation, that’d be — that’s pretty big.
Jason Hutt: And that’s another big one for also after you’ve landed in the ocean.
Host: Oh, yeah.
Jason Hutt: If all four crew members are — so in this scenario where we’ve been in this spacesuit for 144 hours, there’s the possibility for after we splashdown in the ocean, that the crew members might not be able to do anything, they may not be able to take action, maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but from a conservative standpoint, we say, okay, let’s assume they can’t take action, what we need to happen, and we’d go on and we’ve defined an automated sequence that would shutdown the vehicles as quickly as possible, allow the Navy to move in as quickly as possible, and get doctors inside that spacecraft to help out the crew as quickly as possible. Because that’s when the crew is going to be in need of immediate medical attention, and we want to make sure that we’ve set up for that — that can happen as quickly as possible.
Host: And the key thing you can plan for is time.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: Just make sure you’re doing it as —
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: — as quickly as possible. Yes. So here’s an interesting question, just based on the things that we’ve thought about, right? Obviously, I’m learning things about emergencies, there’s things that I’ve never thought about, when is enough and how do you know that you are in a good position that you can say, we’re ready to fly?
Jason Hutt: So when is enough? It is always a difficult question.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: And we look at failure probabilities and we look at what’s the probability of this thing catching on fire? What’s the probably of a micrometeoroid impact? We try to draw a reasonable line, and then we are always — we mentioned the two variables before, mass and cost. What can we do within our budget? And my role in this, as Crew Systems Integrationist, is to make sure — I have to be able to tell our program manager that we can respond to a fire from the start of an event, to getting the crew home. We can respond to a leak from the starting event, to getting the crew home; and so I bring all of those different engineers, doctors, military personnel in and we talked through everybody’s piece of it, and we make sure that all of these pieces connect together with the design that we have. If I find a gap, you know, if I find that we have an issue where — and we’ve been working through some of our challenges, say, we need extra filters for removing smoke or something like that, then we take that forward to program management and we have a discussion of, here’s where we see a gap in our response, here’s how much it would cost for to us add this, here’s how much mass it would add to the vehicle. And then everybody, the various owners of those evaluate, we discuss, okay, how does this way in relative priority to other systems? To other issues that we need to go fix and then we make the — we have the risk trade discussion. If it’s something where it’s going to effect the ability of the crew to survive in this situation, well, it’s going to funded, typically, or we’re going to have a very hard discussion about what is the real risk here and can we really get comfortable with accepting that risk?
Host: Okay. So — interesting. There’s — you have to really — I guess, yeah, is about comfort it’s about — and I think this is a key point is based on your discussion it’s the number one priority is crew safety and then, I guess kind of trickles down is mission success, integrity of the vehicle.
Jason Hutt: Correct.
Host: But number one, and all of these scenarios that you’re talking about, is the safety of the crew. Like you said, the time of the event, to the time you get the crew home.
Jason Hutt: Once an emergency starts there’s no guarantee that we can resume the mission.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: And my main focus at that point is getting the crew home.
Host: Okay.
Jason Hutt: If we can return to our normal or close to normal operations, that’s great.
Host: Yes.
Jason Hutt: But my real main concern is make sure we keep the whole crew alive and get them home.
Host: Right. And that’s your job, your job is to think about the worst case scenario where
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: — the situation is that we are getting the crew home.
Jason Hutt: And that’s where we go through and we, kind of, try the pick out, what’s a most likely fire source that could be a biggest problem to us? What’s the largest hole that we can protect for? What are the most dangerous chemicals that are in the spacecraft that we need to make sure we have protection against?
Host: Yes. So, so we’re talking about Orion, obviously, right? This vehicle is a deep space vehicle and the missions that we’ve been talking about so far are some of the ones that we know are coming up in the near future.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: The ones to the moon, the ones around the moon, we’re talking about basically lunar missions. You’re talking about from the time of the event, six days you’d have to be in a pressurized suit for a lunar mission.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: Right? So how — what do we have to change, what do we have to adapt, what do we have to think about for missions even deeper than space?
Jason Hutt: Well, you know, I’ll start with Gateway, you know, we’re working with the Gateway team now. There are missions that would take Orion farther than five days away from home. And so we have to have a discussion, if we have a leak in the spacecraft and we’re farther from five days from home, do we have a way to address that? Is it possible to still dock with Gateway and use that as a life boat or a place to stay for a few days until we get to a point where we’re only five days away from home? Fire is a relatively similar process, in terms of you have the capability to extinguish the fire. If that, again, comes down to if you can’t get your atmosphere breathable, then you’d get into the suit and you have 144 hours of capability, so that’s a real key one; but then the other thing to think about is as we go even farther is the number of crew members, and things like right now we have a radiation shelter that can handle few crew members within the Orion spacecraft. Is Orion part of the architecture that goes to Mars? Do you have that radiation shelter? Do you need a larger radiation shelter? If you have something that some of our commercial companies have looked at really kind of a large scale vehicle, how are you going to protect all of those people in that type of environment? What kind of systems do you have?
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: And you’re talking about scaling up systems from one or two up to four right now, up to more than that. So we have to — the key is how far are you away from home? What other assets do you have out there that you can use? And then are you comfortable with either not covering something and just accepting the risk that this won’t happen or do we need to provide some changes to the system? One of the things that’s been mentioned that’s part of the Gateway architecture is having our commercial providers provide supplies, just like they do for ISS. Do you bring separate emergency equipment or more air or more water so that you can use that Gateway as a platform or a life boat to keep you alive for a little bit longer in space, if you needed to in an emergency.
Host: Okay. Yeah. Still a lot of steps, right?
Jason Hutt: Yes.
Host: As we go further out, obviously, even just talking about this, all of the different emergency situations, this is just to get on and around the moon.
Jason Hutt: That’s right.
Host: And around — I mean, as you go further, it gets way more complicated.
Jason Hutt: Right.
Host: Yeah.
Jason Hutt: And there’s comes a point where you can’t — and you go into this, you know, and you can’t protect for everything.
Host: Sure.
Jason Hutt: So, again, you try to give the system enough capability. Going back to the Martin example where, you know, here’s the design you have, hopefully we’ve given you enough that you can take that and you can adapt that in a way that allows you to get safely home, no matter what the actual situation is. You know, hopefully we’ve avoided from Apollo 13 the square peg in the round hole when it came to the CO2 cartage so that if you have to use something beyond its intended purpose, you still have that capability available to you.
Host: There you go. Well, Jason, I think after this discussion I feel pretty good about the Orion spacecraft.
Jason Hutt: You’re good.
Host: I’m not an astronaut, but honestly after going through all of the different emergency scenarios, all of the things you thought about, you and your team obviously, to make sure that the crew is going to be safe, I think we could feel pretty good about some of these missions coming up.
Jason Hutt: I hope so. You know, that’s something that you never say absolutely, but yes, I hope so.
Host: Yes, yeah, exactly. That’s your job, is to make sure. Well, Jason, thank you so much for coming on.
Jason Hutt: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.
[Music]
Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around so today we talked with Jason Hutt about some of the unlikely emergencies that could happen on the Orion spacecraft and how we are prepared for them. So if you’ve, again, listened to us before you know that we’ve gone through some of the five technologies from the article “Top Five Technologies Needed for a Spacecraft to Survive Deep Space,” and today, we talked about if any of those systems go wrong, what we are going to do about them. So you could follow Orion on social media Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram you could also follow what’s going on with the International Space Station, and here, at the Johnson Space Center. Use the hashtag #askNASA on any one of those platforms, mention Houston We Have a Podcast and we’ll bring it on the show. So this episode was recorded on November 20, 2018. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Bill Stafford, Pat Ryan, Laura Rochon, Barb Zelon, Kylie Clem and Rachel Kraft, and thanks again to Mr. Jason Hutt for coming on the show. We’ll be back next week.