Innovative Test Operations to Support Orion and Future Human Rated Missions

This paper describes how the Orion program is implementing new and innovative test approaches and strategies in an evolving development environment. The Orion program successfully completed the EFT-1 flight test in 2014 and is currently assembling, integrating, and testing the EM-1 spacecraft to meet the flight test objectives of an unmanned orbital mission to the moon and return to earth in 2019. The EM-2 spacecraft will be the first crewed mission and is planned in 2021. The early flight test spacecraft are evolving in design maturity and complexity requiring significant changes in the ground test operations for each mission. The resulting testing approach for EM-2 is planned to validate innovative Orion production acceptance testing methods to support human exploration missions in the future. This approach will also benefit human exploration vehicles in the future in achieving affordable and low risk goals. The Orion flight test vehicle, EFT-1, was built and tested using the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout (O&C) facility at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Orion manufacturing and testing was located at KSC to provide a seamless transition directly to the launch site avoiding transportation and checkout of the spacecraft from other locations. Innovative test operations approaches were established early on in the O&C facility activation to integrate with the production operations providing a robust and flexible factory to meet Orion’s evolving requirements. As a development flight test article, EFT-1 experienced limited acceptance testing for structural static and dynamic testing and subsystem functional test and checkout. The success of the EFT-1 mission not only validated the engineering design, both hardware and software, but also demonstrated that