Work at NASA continues, despite all the hoopla and hand wringing. This week we have crew members coming over to the low-fidelity Orion mockup to test out some Rotational Hand Controller (RHC) prototypes. One of the prototypes is a super-expensive mockup made at Langley that's electrically functional and has the correct translation, which is kind of cool, except that the body is a very old design and not really representative of what we're planning on doing. The next one is a stereolithed model that's volumetrically equivalent to the current baseline proposal, but I've made models of all the buttons and put them on Velcro so that we can move them around and try different places (in particular there's a lot of question about where the launch abort button is going to go). Then there's a third mockup that is like the baseline but a bit bigger to accommodate some proposed SCRAM (Safe Crew Return After Malfunction) switches that will give some manual overrides for roll control during a Bad Day. That may change too, but it's rough because Pencils Down is coming in a few weeks.
So that's exciting. Also exciting is that I'm working on a pile of proposals for us to get funding to pursue next generation HMI technology. This is sort of an independent path from Constellation, so if we do get money it stays there even if Constellation does get the axe. If it doesn't, then some of what we do might end up in the Lunar Upgrade or later revisions of Orion. Or if there's no Orion, it will more than likely end up in whatever crewed vehicle comes next.
It's really interesting stuff. The current Orion cockpit is actually kind of old school; it's not much more advanced than the Shuttle from an HMI perspective (the avionics themselves are actually really fantastic and there's lots of cutting edge stuff there). What we want to do is look past the current level of stuff and get into the really amazing stuff that will still be powerful and robust in 10-15 years. We have lots of great ideas, and a lot of it is going to involve industry and academic cooperation, which is a great bonus. Here's hoping we get to pursue them!