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<img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" /><br /><br /><b>SPACE.com</b> 2006/09/27<br /><br />The pieces are coming together for NASA’s next spaceship Orion as space agency engineers begin working with lead contractor Lockheed Martin to shape the vehicle’s cockpit.<br /><br />“We’re bringing the design teams together and looking at the features of this so that we can adjust and have one integrated concept,” NASA’s Orion project manager Caris ‘Skip’ Hatfield told SPACE.com this month, adding that astronauts are key in the design process. “We don’t want to deliver them a cockpit and have them hate it.”<br /><br />The Orion cockpit is just one of many features under review by NASA and Lockheed engineers as the agency discusses the requirements necessary for the capsule-based spacecraft, which is expected to begin manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014 and return astronauts to the Moon by no later than 2020.<br /><br />Engineers are using a Lockheed Orion mock-up, along with a NASA-built counterpart at the agency’s Johnson Space Center, to set out a definitive design for the post-shuttle era spacecraft. The contractor then opened a mock-up of the spacecraft to reporters at its Houston-based Exploration Development Laboratory this month.<br /><br />“This is a long way from ready-to-cut metal,” NASA astronaut Lee Morin, who is helping to develop the avionics and crew systems for Orion vehicles, said in an interview. “But it’s a very important step in that direction.”<br /><br />NASA tapped Lockheed to build the solar-powered Orion vehicle on Aug. 31. The spacecraft is designed to succeed NASA’s three space shuttles – Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour – which are set to be retired by September 2010.<br /><br /><b>Old look, new systems</b><br /><br />While the Orion vehicles owes much of its capsule look to NASA’s Apollo vehicles, which carried astronauts to the Moon and Skylab space