Design, Development, Fabrication, and Test of an Environmental/Thermal Control and Life Support System in Support of the Apollo Applications Program 670840

This paper contains a discussion of the hardware development effort expended by the personnel of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in the field of environmental/thermal control and life support systems in support of the Apollo Applications Program.

Although the Manned Spacecraft Center staff anticipated that the next space program would be an Apollo extension, it was also recognized that the detailed definition of the program would lag the requirement for basic subsystem development. Thus, to permit the vehicle prime contractor to proceed judiciously with the design of the spacecraft upon program definition, the MSG staff initiated an effort to provide the required subsystem advances. The basic goals of this effort were to meet the subsystem development requirements with a directed development program and to develop the new hardware components such that a qualification program could be instituted by the prime contractor with minimum development efforts. Another major goal was to demonstrate the adequacy of the system developed for manned space application by means of a long-duration manned system test. The method of accomplishing these goals, a description of the development tests conducted, and the hardware fabricated are summarized in this paper.