NASA's Orion spacecraft set off a new era in manned space exploration last Friday with its first successful test flight. That test flight, which sent a crew-intended vehicle farther into space than any other such vehicle since the last of NASA's Apollo missions in the 1970s, not only went according to plan, but went perfectly.
NASA captured much of Orion's flight in photos, forever preserving mankind's first step in a journey that will take us to deep space and Mars.
NASA originally scheduled Orion for launch on Thursday, but multiple problems that included high winds, a stray boat in the launch area and some problems with Orion's rocket delayed its first flight. Friday, though, saw nothing but smooth sailing, or flying, for the vehicle, which spent a total of 4 ½ hours in Earth's orbit before landing into the Pacific Ocean, just a mile away from its intended target.
During its first test, Orion's flight exposed it to temperatures around 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit while it sped around Earth at 20,000 miles per hour.
"Today's flight test of Orion is a huge step for NASA and a really critical part of our work to pioneer deep space on our journey to Mars," says NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "The teams did a tremendous job putting Orion through its paces in the real environment it will endure as we push the boundary of human exploration in the coming years."
Moving forward, NASA will use what it learned from Orion's first flight and design the next capsule based on that data. Eventually, the capsule will take astronauts to an asteroid to bring back samples to Earth for study. Orion's main mission, though, is to take astronauts to Mars by the 2030s.
"We really pushed Orion as much as we could to give us real data that we can use to improve Orion's design going forward," said Mark Geyer, Orion Program manager. "In the coming weeks and months we'll be taking a look at that invaluable information and applying lessons learned to the next Orion spacecraft already in production for the first mission atop the Space Launch System rocket."
