 Okay, I'm here in the NASA booth with Jared down and he is believe it or not the expert on The parachute deployment system for the Orion capsule. So I was hoping I could get a little Little discussion with you Jared on how this all systems working and how it's going. How you doing today? I'm excellent. Thank you So I guess I can tell you a little bit about Orion first of all a little bit about SLS Which is our new rocket and then most importantly for me at least the parachute system So we've got Orion here Orion's our next generation spacecraft is going to take four astronauts to Mars We might make some quick stops at the moon first just to test out our systems Build a deep space gateway around the moon and then eventually sends our send our astronauts to Mars in the 2030s So Orion looks a lot like Apollo, but it's much bigger We've got four astronauts on board as I mentioned sits atop SLS right here. So you can see here's a little guy little Orion. That's this guy. Yep and That is a is a small section view of our larger rocket here. So this is what SLS will look like on the pad SLS is one of the or the most powerful rocket built to date and it'll launch for the first time with Orion next year in December Just to give me a feel for the size Can you tell me how how powerful that is relative to Saturn 5? Sure So it's more powerful than Saturn 5 about the same size in terms of the the height So we've got new technologies better materials so we can build a more efficient powerful rocket than we could Excellent. Okay. So parachute system. Let me tell you about that. So our astronauts are gonna go to the moon They're gonna go to Mars. We got to bring them back and that's where these parachutes come into play So Orion's got 11 parachutes on board. They're all packed up here in the forward bay Three of them are used to lift off the cover and they look a lot like this one So this is the smallest parachute we have on board. This is about 60 square feet So our parachutes range from this size up to our largest We have three main parachutes and those are each 11,000 square feet. So cover five or six houses They're they're pretty big so these smaller parachutes lift up those larger parachutes so that we can have a nice safe landing about 20 miles per hour So our crews nice and safe in the water when they come home splash down at 20 How does that compare to say Apollo's it's very similar very similar so Orion is much bigger It weighs a lot more so the parachutes are thus much bigger So we need larger drag area to produce the force we need to counteract the additional weight of the vehicle Can you tell me about how far through testing of the parachute system you are excellent question? So we've gone through about 17 development tests where we test the parachutes We go out to Yuma, Arizona Toss out a small-scale capsule of Orion out at the back of a C-17 and run through the entire parachute sequence gather lots of video data Lots of telemetry based on the the speed the altitude the attitude of the vehicle to learn about what we need to change We change the parachutes through each one of those tests to make them better and now we're in the Qualification phase so after those 17 tests we now have a series of eight tests in which we are not changing anything But we're we're proving that these parachutes work in all the various conditions that we need so for instance SLS we got this launcher board system here on top So if there's an issue whether it's on the pad like we see behind us or anywhere on the ascent of the vehicle And we need to get the crew off safely this this ascent abort System will pull the crew off these parachutes need to work in a wide range of conditions Whether it's from the pad at zero speed zero altitude all the way up to nominal reentry coming back from Mars So we need to test this at various Corners of the boxes we call it of our requirements to make sure that the entire parachute system works any time we would need it Just to give us a feel for how fast this system is traveling down as the first parachute deploys Do you know what that speed is? Yeah, it's about 350 miles an hour So coming back from Mars. We're at about 20,000 miles an hour But the the drag from the heat shield here the blunt body and the friction with the atmosphere slows us down from that 20,000 miles per hour down to about 350 and at about 350 miles per hours only start deploying our parachutes And the pair have the test been rather successful thus far Yes, very successful. It must be if you're now at the final configuration and doing qual testing Absolutely, you know as an engineer you can always look to make things better, but that can be Have to freeze at some point right right so we freeze we frozen at a at a point that we like We know that it works well now. We're just proving that so that we can certify it for human use Can you give me a feel for when we might see launches of the SLS system itself? Absolutely So the first launch of SLS is called em1 and that's going to be in December of 2019 So just next year about two years away that's going to send Orion an unmanned Orion around the moon We're going to do some some science together data on both the performance of the rocket Performance of Orion performance of the parachutes and all the other systems so that we can get ready for our first crewed mission in about 2022 in the early 2020 so again with SLS and Orion and that first crewed mission will be an orbital flight Maybe go around the moon at some point. Yes, absolutely In the vicinity of the moon sys lunar space to gather information about how Orion performs with humans on board To test out our guidance navigation control systems and to ultimately ultimately prepare for our journey to Mars with humans in the 2030s. Fantastic. Well, Jared, I appreciate your time. I'm really pushing for this system I want to see the US back in deep space and with your help. I'm sure we'll get there. Thank you very much. I appreciate it