Orion Lite

Orion Lite was an unofficial name used in the media for a lightweight crew capsule proposed by Bigelow Aerospace in collaboration with Lockheed Martin. It was to be based on the Orion spacecraft that Lockheed Martin was developing for NASA. It would be a lighter, less capable and cheaper version of the full Orion.

The intention of designing Orion Lite would be to provide a stripped down version of the Orion that will be available for missions to the International Space Station earlier than the more capable Orion, which is designed for longer duration missions to the Moon, Mars, Lagrange points, and Near Earth asteroids.

Bigelow began working with Lockheed Martin in 2004. A few years later Bigelow signed a million-dollar contract to develop "an Orion mockup, an Orion Lite."

Orion Lite's primary mission would be to transport crew to the International Space Station, or to private space stations such as the proposed Sundancer from Bigelow Aerospace. While Orion Lite would have relatively the same exterior dimensions as the Orion, there would be no need for the deep space infrastructure present in the Orion configuration. As such, the Orion Lite will be able to support larger crews of around 7 people as the result of greater habitable interior volume and the reduced weight of equipment needed to support an exclusively low-Earth-orbit configuration.

The Orion Lite is also not to be confused with the Orion Crew Return Vehicle, a scaled down version of Orion proposed by the Obama administration. In an earlier budget proposal the Orion had been slated for cancellation altogether.

Launch systems

The Orion Lite is proposed to be compatible with multiple launchers, including the existing Atlas V rocket. A human-rated version of the Atlas V would have to be developed in conjunction with the Orion Lite. Work on this has started, funded by stimulus funds granted under NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. Likewise, a human-rated version of the SpaceX Falcon 9 has also been suggested by Bigelow as a possible launch system.

Program status

Both the proposed collaboration between Bigelow and Lockheed Martin and the Orion Lite itself appear to have been dropped. Bigelow is now working on a similar capsule, the CST-100, with Boeing. Under NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program Boeing and Bigelow Aerospace have since been awarded funding for preliminary work on this capsule, which has no Orion heritage. The name Orion Lite has also been used for this capsule, though this is not correct. No official name has been announced.

Other sources indicate that the Orion Lite project may not have been abandoned by Bigelow. In January 2011, Pat Hynes of the Space Grant Consortium wrote in the Las Cruces Sun-News that Bigelow still plans to use Orion Lite to transport customers to the Bigelow space station.

Recovery

A helicopter with a long hook can catch a parachuting object in mid-air, as seen here in a practice run for the planned retrieval of Genesis.

In order to reduce the weight of Orion Lite, the more durable heat shield of the Orion would be replaced with a lighter weight heat shield designed to support the lower temperatures of Earth atmospheric re-entry from low Earth orbit. Additionally, the current proposal calls for a mid-air retrieval, wherein another aircraft captures the descending Orion Lite module. To date, such a retrieval method has not been employed for manned spacecraft, although it has been used with satellites.