Status of the Development of an Airbag Landing System for the Orion Crew Module

This paper documents the status of the development of an airbag landing system for the Orion Crew Module. This work was in support of the NASA Langley Research Center LaRC Landing System Advanced Development Project. Airborne Systems (formally Irvin Aerospace Inc) and ILC Dover, originally as competitors and now as partners have developed and tested nominal land landing and contingency land landing airbag systems. Orion is part of the Constellation Program to send human explorers back to the moon, and then onwards to Mars and other destinations in the Solar System. A component of the Vision for Space Exploration, Orion is being developed to also enable access to space following the retirement of the Space Shuttle in the next decade.