How much more elbow room does Artemis II's Orion have than Apollo?

The Orion spacecraft that’s taking the four Artemis II astronauts around the moon and back is the largest crewed capsule ever sent beyond low Earth orbit – with habitable space roughly equal to that of two minivans combined, NASA says.

Four people living in two minivans for 685,000 miles over 10 days, the duration of the Artemis flight, may sound a bit cramped, even claustrophobic.

The Orion capsule, with an interior space of 330 cubic feet, is nearly 60% larger than its Apollo command module predecessor and much bigger than the early Mercury and Gemini capsules of the 1960s.

That's a long way from the days of Mercury astronauts, described by “The Right Stuff” author Tom Wolfe as “spam in a can.”

Why does Orion resemble Apollo?

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Orion carries four astronauts: NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen. It has nearly 18% more habitable cubic space per person than Apollo, which carried a crew of three aboard its command modules.

How capsule interior space compares

Space capsules are small out of necessity – they have to be as light as possible to launch and shaped to survive the high-heat, high-speed reentry into the atmosphere.

The Orion capsule, or crew module, was designed and built by Lockheed Martin. Designers briefly considered a winged vehicle instead of a capsule, according to a 2019 report by Lockheed Martin Space Communications.

Though a winged craft could use aerobraking in the atmosphere during reentry, the design was considered more complex and riskier than a capsule. NASA favored the capsule shape because of existing data on the Apollo, Lockheed says.

That's why Orion – and crew modules built by SpaceX and Boeing – looks like a larger, more sophisticated version of Apollo.

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Reuters; NASA; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Lockheed Martin; National Museum of the United States Air Force; space.com