Orion space craft water and land landing system simulation; An injury case study

NASA’s return to moon program had kept the NESC (NASA Engineering and Safety Center) busy for the past several years. The NESC was charged to come up with a safe landing for the Orion capsule. Water and land landing is considered for the Orion capsule. The NESC took major initiative to come up with recommendation to the program. Part of this initiative is to come up with Injury criteria recommendation during the landing of the Orion capsule. Impact simulation is used to assess the injury and pulse responses of the Orion during landing. Major tasks were under taken to validate the steps of the impact simulations. The models used in water landing, soil landing, and the finite element dummies were validated through experimental testing. In here some of the validation is presented. The paper finally compares the injury values of the astronauts during water and land landing.