Countdown to Orion starts Wednesday, rocketmakers are already counting

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Very late Wednesday night, a giant white tower — 9.5 million pounds of it, to be exact — will roll about 300 feet away from the Space Launch Complex 37 launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base to reveal NASA’s Orion capsule, ready and waiting atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. And then the countdown begins.

Orion is set to launch Thursday on its first test flight. It will go farther into space than any NASA spacecraft built for humans in more than 40 years, powered by Colorado aerospace.

“For the most part, when people think launch, they think NASA … they don’t think commercial contractors and Air Force and all the other players,” said Tony Taliancich, United Launch Alliance’s director of East Coast launch operations. “And I think people really under-appreciate how much Colorado adds in terms of intellectual talent.”

Orion is truly a project with Colorado at its heart. It was designed and built at Littleton-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems and will perform key communications tasks with components made by Broomfield-based Ball Aerospace. It will take a 17-minute ride into orbit on the Delta IV Heavy rocket, made by Centennial-based ULA, orbit the Earth twice, and then will splash down about four hours later off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.

Orion is part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s plan to eventually land humans on asteroids, Mars and other never-before visited destinations.

ULA is split into thirds: Engineering and management is handled in Centennial; fabrication and manufacturing are done in Decatur, Ala., and Harlingen, Texas; and the company launches from both Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Rockets are transported via ship to both East and West Coast launch facilities. At Cape Canaveral, ULA’s sprawling campus houses assembly and testing and launch-command centers for Atlas and Delta rockets. Some of these facilities have pop-culture fame: Portions of 2011’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” were filmed in the Atlas V Spaceflight Operations Center.

The Delta IV Heavy that will carry Orion to space was assembled in ULA’s Horizontal Integration Facility — known as “HIF” in the acronym-happy aerospace world — an impressive structure on Cape Canaveral. This giant warehouse is large enough to hold three Delta rockets horizontally, side by side.

It’s hard to comprehend the enormity of these massive boosters until standing next to one. Reaching a height of about 23 stories tall and about 17 feet in diameter, the fully assembled system that will carry Orion to space weighs a whopping 1.6 million pounds.

As expected, they’re calibrated and aligned with pedantic precision. But there’s precise, and then there’s ULA precise.

HIF boasts the flattest floor in the world — at least that’s what the Engineering News-Record article posted on the facility’s wall says — which allows the segments of the booster rocket to be lined up with little to no room for error. And this precision is one reason the company boasts the stellar record of 89 consecutive successful launches.

Once the rocket is assembled, it’s carried out to the launch pad at a speed of about 2.5 mph and then raised up to a vertical launch stance in a maneuver that looks much like a drawbridge moving up.

And then? If all goes well, Orion will be on its way aboard the world’s most powerful rocket — the mere thought of which makes Taliancich giddy.

“This is the best job you can ever have,” he said.

Laura Keeney: lkeeney@denverpost.com, 303-954-1337 or twitter.com/laurakeeney