From Ohio to the moon and even Mars: NASA Glenn adds thrust to space exploration

CLEVELAND – It may be hard to match the excitement and wonder of Apollo, the NASA program from the 1960s and 1970s that put man on the moon, but the space agency is aiming to try with Artemis – its bold plan to return to the lunar surface.

The heady goal bodes well for NASA Glenn Research Center, located in Brook Park, just beyond the runways at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Inside a complex of largely bland buildings, a lot of smart people are looking to advance technologies that make space exploration possible.

“We’re at the highest facility usage in the history of the center,” said Mike Barrett, director of spaceflight systems at NASA Glenn, one of several NASA outposts around the country.

While much of the testing and research at NASA Glenn involves aeronautics, the first “A” in NASA, more than half the 3,200 scientists, engineers and others working there are devoted to space, and that includes Artemis and what lies beyond – a manned mission to Mars.

“Certainly, on the space side we’re very busy,” Barrett said.

A visit from the brass

Last month, the center hosted NASA’s top two administrators and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, whose support in Congress has helped to ensure adequate funding for NASA Glenn over the years.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, both former astronauts, were in town to visit with employees and outline the scope of NASA’s updated Moon to Mars effort.

“This is a very exciting time for the agency,” Melroy told a small pack of journalists.

“Hopefully, it didn’t escape your notice that NASA went back to the moon for the first time in 50 years last year on our Artemis I mission, but that’s really only the beginning,” Melroy said. “Our Moon to Mars strategy is to develop a blueprint for sustained human presence, science and exploration throughout the solar system.”

Focus on the moon

The moon is a relatively short distance from Earth, only 240,000 miles. If you could go by car, it would be like driving coast to coast across the United States 80 times.

“It’s not terribly far,” NASA Glenn spokesman James Russell said. ” … It’s about a three-day trip to and from.”

Mars is a different story. It’s always at least 34 million miles from Earth. The distance changes because Earth and Mars are in different orbits around the sun. NASA envisions its first manned visit to Mars to be sometime around 2039. The astronauts would stick around on the red planet for 30 days, taking roughly six months to get there and 10 months to get back.

But first, NASA wants to rediscover the moon, create a “sustained presence” there, and use it to conduct experiments that will further exploration of the solar system.

That includes sending up a space station called Gateway that will continuously orbit the moon for at least 15 years and serve as a staging area for manned trips to the lunar surface.

So where does NASA Glenn fit in?

Propulsion and energy

A big part of NASA Glenn’s mission over the years has been to design and test propulsion systems and that will continue during Artemis.

Propulsion has been a technological sweet spot for Glenn since the 1960s and the development of the gridded-ion thruster, a technology that was recently used to propel the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft into an asteroid in order to change its orbit.

The Russians developed a similar technology known as the “Hall” thruster. After the Iron Curtain came down, the United States obtained that technology and have since improved upon it, Barrett said. It’s now the propulsion system planned for Gateway.

The seven thrusters – three the size of dinner plates and four a little smaller – that will be part of Gateway’s “power and propulsion element” will be energized by two solar arrays, each the size of the end zone on a football field.

The arrays will convert sunlight into electricity that will generate ions used to charge xenon gas. The charged gas will then be expelled out the back of the thruster, moving the craft forward in the opposite direction. It will be kind of like someone standing on a skateboard and tossing a bowling ball in one direction, and being propelled in the other, Barrett said.

The thrust will create a blue plume, Barrett said, an image that can be seen on spacecraft in the movie The Martian and some of the Star Wars films.

While the thrusters are being built by Aerojet Rocketdyne in Renton, Washington, and Busek of Natick, Massachusetts, they are being tested at NASA Glenn inside giant vacuum chambers that replicate the lack of oxygen in space.

Ultimately, the thrusters could be used to propel a spaceship all the way to Mars, only the power source could be nuclear instead of solar, Barrett said.

Timeline

The power and propulsion element, along with astronaut living quarters are slated to be launched together into space in 2025. It will take almost a year for them to reach the moon because electric propulsion, while more efficient, takes longer to accelerate than a traditional rocket using chemical propulsion, Russell said. Plus, there will be the need to do some testing along the way.

NASA expects Gateway to be operational for at least 15 years and during that time rendezvous with the Orion spaceship when it ferries astronauts to and from the moon on future missions.

Orion made its first orbit of the moon late last year as part of the Artemis I mission. The mission was unmanned, but when Orion returns to space as part of the Artemis II mission in 2024, it will have four astronauts aboard.

Artemis III, slated for 2025, is expected to include a lunar landing. The plan is to have Orion dock in space with another vehicle called Starship that will be launched by SpaceX. When that happens, the astronauts will leave Orion and climb aboard Starship, which will then descend to the lunar surface.

Orion will probably not start docking with Gateway until at least 2026 and the launching of Artemis iV.

Besides continuing its work on propulsion, NASA Glenn will also lead the development of a power grid on the moon that will incorporate solar arrays, nuclear fission power, fuel cells and battery storage. A testing facility has yet to be constructed.

Tires and testing

The return to the moon includes the introduction of a lunar rover called VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover. The craft is being built at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, but it’s being tested at NASA Glenn at its Simulated Lunar Operations Lab.

VIPER will continue testing at NASA Glenn until launch, which is scheduled for late 2024, Russell said. The unmanned rover will look for ice in the vicinity of the moon’s South Pole, where NASA plans to set up a permanent laboratory for astronauts to live and work.

NASA Glenn also conducts materials research important to the success of space exploration and that includes tire technology. Inside an otherwise nondescript building is the Simulated Lunar Operations Lab that features what look like two giant rectangular sand boxes, one to simulate soil on the moon and the other on Mars.

The Mars simulant is like a dry quicksand. It consists of tiny, hollow, ceramic grains that replicate the lack of cohesion on Mars. A metal pole penetrates the soil with very little resistance. Nobody has been able to experience Martian soil, but videos of Mars rovers, including Spirit, which got stuck in a Martian dune, has provided clues as to maneurverablity..

The tires on the Martian rovers are much different than the metal-chain variety used to ramble around the moon. They are made from coils of a shape-memory alloy that when flexed, return to their original shape.

Zero gravity on Earth

Also playing a support role is NASA Glenn’s Zero-G Drop Tower, which isn’t a tower at all. It’s a 500-foot-silo almost completely below ground.

NASA uses it to test experimental equipment in zero gravity. The hardware to be checked out is packed into missile-like pods and then dropped down the silo where they reach terminal velocity before plunging into a bed of Styrofoam beads.

The speedy descent – dropping about the equivalent of a 40-story building – provides about five seconds of zero-gravity, enough to let scientists know if things will perform the way they are supposed to in space.

The tower was used during the Apollo program to determine whether fuel would flow properly from their tanks on the command and lunar modules.

In recent years, the Zero G Drop Tower has allowed NASA to prove that experiments work on the ground before they go up to the International Space Station.

Barrett said he would eventually like to add an electromagnetic rail, something akin to a vertical maglev train, to the tower that could slow the speed of descent to simulate lunar gravity, which is one-sixth that of Earth’s gravity.

Living in space

An astronaut’s body is exposed to a lot of forces that create physical changes. Bones get weaker. Fluids shift. The heart is forced to work harder. Vison changes. The astronauts behave differently.

For those reasons, astronauts need to exercise and stay and in shape while floating around in space.

While the astronauts train at the Johnson Space Center, the exercise gear they will use in space is developed at NASA Glenn. Devices include treadmill and cycling machines, as well as resistance equipment.

The challenge is more than just making them functional in zero gravity, but also enabling them to fit in areas with limited space

The future

The future of NASA depends on funding. During his visit to NASA Glenn, Nelson expressed concerns about the rhetoric coming from Republicans about cutting the budget and said what was being discussed would be disastrous for NASA.

Brown, who was part of a bipartisan coalition of Ohio members of Congress that recently presented President Joe Biden and others about the importance of NASA Glenn, said during last month’s visit to the center that he made a point of asking James Kenyon, the director of NASA Glenn, to not by shy about reaching out as well.

“I encouraged Dr. Kenyon to encourage House members to come here, including ones that may not agree with what we’re doing here, and educate them and teach them about this jewel on the North Coast of Ohio,” Brown said.

A jewel that opened in 1941 as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’s Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, but in the decades since has become so much more.