Orion Mission A Success: NASA Completes Test Flight Of Mars-Bound Spacecraft
NASA successfully completed the first step to send astronauts to Mars as its brand-new Orion capsule made a near-bullseye splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday after a flawless launch and unmanned debut test flight around Earth.
The cone-shaped capsule earlier blasted off aboard a Delta 4 Heavy rocket, the biggest in the U.S. fleet, just after dawn on Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Three hours later, it reached an altitude of 5,800 km above Earth -- a distance 15 times greater than that of the International Space Station -- orbited twice for about four hours and then plunged back to Earth at a speed of about 32,000 kph.
Orion survived the 4,000 degree Fahrenheit heat of re-entry -- twice as hot as molten lava –and splashed down 1,014 km southwest of San Diego, California, at 11:29 a.m. EST after deploying 11 parachutes.
NASA said the main mission of the $375-million test flight was to check whether Orion's heat shield, parachutes, avionics and other equipment would work as designed before astronauts could fly aboard. Although the Orion spacecraft was unmanned, its cabin was filled with 1,200 sensors to collect information about radiation and heat, as well as testing different systems, including the launch abort system.
NASA has spent more than $9 billion developing Orion. It is scheduled to make a second test flight, also unmanned, in 2018.
The third mission is expected in 2021 and this time it will include two astronauts on a flight around the moon. That will mark the first time that astronauts will fly around the moon since the Apollo moon program ended in 1972.
During a news conference on Tuesday, NASA announced that Orion will bring four astronauts at a time to asteroids between Earth and Mars by 2025.
The first humans are expected to land on the red planet in the mid-2030s.
