Skip to footer

Orion returns to Florida: What's next for NASA space capsule?

After a week in transit, NASA's Orion space capsule is back at the Kennedy Space Center for more testing. 

|
NASA Twitter
NASA's Orion space capsule back in Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 18, 2014, after its first test flight.

NASA's first Orion space capsule — which made its spaceflight debut at the beginning of this month — has returned to Florida after more than a week in transit.

The capsule, designed to bring humans farther into space than ever before, flew to space for its first unmanned test flight on Dec. 5 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft then splashed down in the Pacific Ocean about 4.5 hours later, when the U.S. Navy retrieved it and towed it into port in San Diego. Orion then went on a cross-country road trip that ultimately brought it back to Kennedy Space Center today (Dec. 18).

Orion's test flight was designed to be rigorous, stressing many of its systems that could one day be used for crewed missions to deep-space destinations like Mars. NASA officials want to examine the flown capsule to see exactly how it stood up to the extreme space environment during its launch, two orbits of Earth, re-entry and splashdown. [Orion's 1st Test Flight: Complete Coverage]

"The flight itself was such a great success, but that's only the beginning of the story," Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer said in a statement. "Now, we get to dig in and really find out if our design performed like we thought it would. This is why we flew the flight. We demonstrated on Dec. 5 that Orion is a very capable vehicle. Now, we're going to keep testing and improving as we begin building the next Orion."

Orion's test earlier this month marked the first time a spacecraft built for humans has flown beyond low-Earth orbit in more than 40 years. The spacecraft is also the first capsule built by NASA designed to take humans to Mars. Space agency officials hope that, one day, Orion could be part of a system that takes astronauts to and from the Red Planet or other destinations like an asteroid.

The capsule flew about 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) above Earth's surface during its highest point in orbit. It then started plummeting back to Earth. The spacecraft's huge heat shield seemed to stand up to the extreme heat produced when the capsule came back through the planet's atmosphere, and its parachutes seemed to function well, NASA scientists said.

"Orion's flight test was a critical step on our journey to send astronauts to explore deep-space destinations," Bill Hill, NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, said in the same statement. "We stressed Orion to help us evaluate its performance and validate our computer models and ground-based evaluations, and the information we gathered will help us improve Orion's design going forward."

Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article onSpace.com.

Copyright 2014 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Orion returns to Florida: What's next for NASA space capsule?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/1222/Orion-returns-to-Florida-What-s-next-for-NASA-space-capsule
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe