The second coming of America's space program began Friday morning with a test of the Orion spacecraft from Florida's Cape Canaveral, ground zero for so many historic launches over the decades.
The Orion capsule was carried into space atop a Delta 4 rocket. It made two orbits at 3,600 miles out before beginning its re-entry and a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja, Calif. The whole mission took four and a half hours, but was worth the $370 million investment so far.
Though unmanned, Orion is the first of a fleet that will be designed to carry crews of astronauts beyond Earth orbit to the moon, nearby asteroids and eventually Mars. The test was NASA's public declaration of its intention to pick up where Apollo 17 left off in 1972.
NASA wants to spark the public's re-engagement with space by showing Orion's potential to go to Mars once a larger crew compartment is designed. It is already more advanced than any equivalent spacecraft of the Russians, Europeans, Chinese or Indians.
Because Orion was outfitted with 1,200 sensors, NASA will learn what conditions will await the human crew to take the helm of a modified Orion in 2021. One of the goals of the test was to determine how the heat shields perform during re-entry, a key concern for astronauts returning from long distances.
The next flight will be a robot-only capsule in 2017. Although NASA is still at the mercy of how far Congress will fund its explorations, the test of Orion proves the space agency still has the right stuff.
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Posted by Unknown on Saturday, December 6, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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