Honeywell engineers design COTS hardware into Orion advanced avionics

摘要

"Reliability is extremely important," said Ray Crum, technical director of the NASA Orion space program at Honeywell Aerospace in Phoenix during a talk on integrating commercial electronics into the Orion spacecraft crew exploration vehicle at the Military & Aerospace Electronics Forum conference and trade show.rn"We have to focus on that in component selection," Crum said in describing the technologies inherent in Orion-the vehicle that will take the four-person crew to the moon. NASA officials want not only to travel to all geographic areas of the moon, which drives the propulsion requirements, but also to stay on the surface for as long as four weeks. While the crew is on the lunar surface, the Orion spacecraft will orbit autonomously. "It's an ambitious program to set up a sustained presence on the moon," Crum continued. Lockheed Martin Corp. in Bethesda, Md., is the prime contractor on Orion.