TORONTO – The next generation spacecraft that is poised to take humans farther into space than ever before returned to the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday after its first successful launch into space.
NASA’s Orion capsule launched on Dec. 5. It splashed down off the coast of Baja California after its four-and-a-half-hour test flight where it was recovered by the U.S. Navy.
READ MORE: Orion completes first test flight in ‘flawless’ fashion
The unmanned capsule travelled 15 times farther than the International Space Station which allowed scientists and engineers to test several of its key systems, including the ship’s computers and how they reacted to the radiation of space, as well as the launch abort system and heat shield.
NASA hailed the mission as a success and a great step forward in space exploration.
“The flight itself was such a great success, but that’s only the beginning of the story,” said Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer. “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.”
Now that the craft has returned to Kennedy Space Center, it will undergo careful scrutiny and analysis in preparation for the next launch, Exploration Mission-1 slated for 2018 where it will travel around the moon.
Comments