A small team of NASA engineers continues to work on development of the X-38 Experimental Crew Return Vehicle (CRV). The project has continued to take incremental steps, by building and conducting atmospheric flight tests on a series of increasingly-complex vehicles. The project culminates with fabrication and flight test of a space vehicle (designated as V-201), with a projected flight as a space shuttle payload in late 2000 or 2001.
The emphasis for this paper will be to discuss the current status of the X-38 project, describe in further detail the vehicle-level requirements and design approach, discuss the Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) system-level requirements and design, recent system updates, and assembly and component-level details. Additionally, data will be presented from the most relevant analyses and tests which have been used to validate the system design and component selections