In Clearwater, engineers build cockpit for Artemis moon mission

At a manufacturing plant off of highway U.S. 19 and Ulmerton Road, Honeywell Aerospace engineers are working toward NASA’s mission to return humans to the moon.

They wear smocks and walk on special floors that protect against electrostatic discharge — or static shock — that can damage the technology. They connect themselves to a wire when working on a device to prevent even the smallest amount of static from affecting their work. Silicone materials have to be handled in their own quarantined section of the room.

This Clearwater lab is tasked with building controls for the cockpit and navigation software on the Orion spacecraft, the capsule that will hold the Artemis program astronauts.

After Artemis I’s successful test flight last year, Honeywell engineers are preparing for the next launch, set for 2024.

And this one will have higher stakes: The rocket will be manned for the first time.

Now, in the lab, a portrait hangs on the wall of the four people NASA announced last month — Christina Hammock Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen — who will make history as the first woman, person of color and international astronaut on a lunar mission.

“People get a chance to see those faces everyday, knowing that everything I do here affects these people’s lives,” said Shauna McCallister, Honeywell senior product manufacturing engineer.

Technology to guide astronauts to the moon ... and maybe Mars

Honeywell, a North Carolina-based technology company with an aerospace factory in Clearwater, has worked on multiple space projects with NASA, from the Mars Lander, to the DART spacecraft that crashed into an asteroid, to the Parker Solar Probe, the closest manmade vehicle to reach the sun. Out of Clearwater, the facility also works on military defense and commercial flight technology.

Some of the Orion work is being done out of Honeywell’s aerospace facilities in Glendale, Arizona, and Puerto Rico, but the staff at the Clearwater site oversee the project.

Last week, NASA and Lockheed Martin officials visited the Florida facility to update staff on the results of the Artemis I test flight, which returned to Earth in December. They also awarded engineers for their contributions, including recognition for finding the root of a power and data unit issue that could have caused months of delays.

Honeywell is helping build Orion’s navigation system using two components to track the capsule: a GPS receiver and a miniature inertia measurement unit, or MIMU.

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“When you get farther away from GPS satellites, you have to start working on something ... where you have to know where you’re at by how fast you’re moving or how your acceleration is,” said Honeywell program manager Joe Searle. “And that’s the inertial measurement unit part of it. So this is a very custom part for the Orion program.”

The company is also working on the controls and three display units within the cockpit, which astronauts will monitor and use to control parts of the Orion spacecraft.

Despite being in an age of touch-screen phones and tablets, the displays are only operated using switches on the side of the board to prevent astronauts in zero gravity from accidentally triggering the screen. Astronauts have heavy input into the design of the control functions to decide what would be most practical for them on the mission.

The flight can be operated automatically from ground control, as the unmanned Artemis I test launch in November showed, but the astronauts can turn off automatic controls to operate it manually, said NASA Orion avionics manager Matthew Lemke.

They would use the Honeywell controls to manually dock into the landing vehicle that would take them to the moon’s surface.

A lot of the technology is being designed for multiple trips in the Artemis program, McCallister said.

The next Artemis flight will be a test with crew on board. Artemis III will be the first time humans return to the moon since the Apollo missions in the 1970s. It’s set for 2025. Later Artemis missions will focus on building a space station in the moon’s orbit for astronauts to live on for short periods and to potentially bring humans to Mars.

With lofty goals, McCallister said making the technology reusable is a priority.

“Some of the changes have been made over time are with some of those scope changes in the mission,” McCallister said. “Our testing has shown us that things may need to be a little bit more robust.”

Florida’s reviving space economy

NASA’s human flight programs have been an economic driver in the Sunshine State, with decades of launches out of Cape Canaveral. But after the Space Shuttle era, the industry faltered for several years.

Now, with the Artemis program and the rise of private commercial space flight, excitement is coming back for out-of-world travel.

“When we stopped flying the space shuttle, that was a very dire time for human spaceflight,” said NASA’s Orion Program manager Howard Hu during his visit to the Honeywell Clearwater facility last week. “But you look at today ... there’s a wealth of opportunity, not just across the country, but specifically in Florida.”

The Artemis Moon to Mars program has partnerships with businesses in every state and is expected to generate $14 billion in economic activity, according to a 2022 NASA report. The agency has more than a dozen contracts with businesses in the Tampa Bay area, including Honeywell in Clearwater and the Israeli company StemRad, which has its U.S. headquarters based in Tampa. StemRad is working on protecting astronauts from radiation.

With every first flight, it’s a flip of a coin whether it’ll be successful or not.

Honeywell could estimate how the tech would work, but it wasn’t until the flight that they could see that they hit their targets, said the company’s vice president of space, Lisa Napolitano.

“It allowed us to understand where we were in our margins,” she said. “It worked exactly as we thought it would — which usually doesn’t happen.”

Despite several launch delays for Artemis last year, Hu updated Honeywell Clearwater staff that “everything performed flawlessly” for the test flight and the spacecraft generated 22% more power than expected. A good thing, since the next program missions will be more complex, Hu said.

After seeing the space shuttle retire, Napolitano said she wondered for a long time if the Artemis program would take off. Now that it has, it marks a new era of space travel in Florida.

“Many of us worked on it for over a decade,” Napolitano said. “And to finally see the launch, it’s just amazing.”