TORONTO – In just one month, NASA’s newest crewed vehicle will undergo its first test flight, taking it farther out than the space station.
Though it is a crewed vehicle, it will be unmanned.
The launch takes place on Dec. 4 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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This is a big step for NASA: It’s been 42 years since humans first ventured farther than low-Earth orbit (where the space station resides).
“This is just the first of what will be a long line of exploration missions beyond low earth orbit, and in a few years we will be sending our astronauts to destinations humans have never experienced,” said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development said in a press conference.
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But in order to fulfill NASA’s bold mission to take astronauts to Mars or beyond, the agency needs a viable craft to get them there.
The flight will take Orion almost 5,800 km from Earth — much farther than the the International Space Station which orbits at an altitude of around 375 km — where it will complete two orbits over its four-and-a-half test.
Once the mission is complete, Orion will begin its descent to Earth, in a way that we haven’t seen in a long time: it will descend at nearly 32,000 km/h and generate temperatures of 2,200 C before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean — just as the Mercury and Apollo missions did at the start of the space program.
Rollout of Orion’s crew module, the service module and launch abort system — which now reside in Kennedy’s Launch Aboard System Facility at Cape Canaveral — is scheduled for Nov. 10. Once at the pad, it will be lifted onto United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy rocket.
That will not be the rocket that ultimately sends a crew into space. Instead, the Space Launch System (SLS) will handle that duty. It will be the world’s most powerful rocket, capable of lifting 130 metric tons (the first approved one will launch 70 metric tons). That’s more rocket power than what sent astronauts to the moon. It can also carry three times the payload of the space shuttle orbiters.
The launch will evaluate the launch and high-speed reentry systems, such as the heat shield and parachutes.
Eventually Orion will carry four astronauts farther into the solar system than ever before, with an anticipated launch some time after 2020.
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