NASA’s Orion to make first step towards manned Mars mission

PanARMENIAN.Net - NASA’s quest to send astronauts out into the solar system will begin this week with a two-laps-around-Earth test flight, the Guardian reports.

The new Orion spacecraft is not going to Mars just yet; the debut on Thursday, Dec 4, will be unmanned and last just four and a half hours. But it will be the farthest a built-for-humans capsule has flown since the Apollo moon missions, shooting 3,600 miles out into space in order to gain enough momentum to re-enter the atmosphere at 20,000mph.

The dry run, if all goes well, will end with a Pacific splashdown off Mexico’s Baja California coast. Navy ships will recover the capsule for future use.

This initial Orion is rigged with 1,200 sensors to gauge its durability for the day when astronauts do climb aboard. Advertised destinations include an asteroid to be corralled in lunar orbit for human exploration in the 2020s, followed by Mars in the 2030s.

“We’re approaching this as pioneers,” said William Hill of NASA’s exploration systems development office. “We’re going out to stay eventually … it’s many, many decades away, but that’s our intent.”

Lockheed Martin built the capsule and is staging the $370m test flight for NASA.

Orion is NASA’s first new spacecraft for humans in more than a generation, succeeding the now retired space shuttles. Unlike the capsules under development by two U.S. companies for space station crew transport, Orion is meant for the long haul, both in time and space; it would be supplemented with habitats for potential Mars trips.