NASA had intended to rebuild its human spaceflight program with the Orion capsule in 2014, with a manned launch in 2016, but it’s been announced that this has been pushed back to 2021.
The maiden test flight is fast approaching, and as planned, the Orion capsule will make two loops around Earth before splashing down into the Pacific Ocean. It’s the first step of the proposed human spaceflight program. The capsule will be sent far beyond the lower Earth orbit of the ISS.
Orion’s orbit will peak at nearly 3,700 miles from Earth, which is the farthest that a NASA spacecraft has gone since the early 1970s. The reason for this distance is so that engineers get to test the heat shield. The test will allow them to determine if Orion can survive reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, where temperatures are expected to reach up to 4,000 degrees.
The flight will also test 10 key systems whose failure could be disastrous for astronauts. The flight will cost $375 million. Since the retirement of the space shuttle program, at least 6,000 jobs have been lost.
The rocket that will launch Orion in 2021 is still under development, is being built by Boeing and ATK. Orion has already cost $6 billion. The test flight will use the Delta IV rocket to launch itself into space.
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3 Comments
Not until 2021??? How did this nation get to the Moon in less than 10 years? Is the long delay a lack of funding, vision or know how? Surely the basic Apollo structure can easily be duplicated and updated with new materials and new electronics. This is a shame that it will take us 9 more years to return to 1960s technology.
Well, Apollo was rather costly – about $150 million in todays dollars. NASA has a budget of $18 billion per year, which covers the entire agency. It takes a heck of a lot of engineers working very hard to build a new man rated spacecraft. The more money you throw at the program, the faster things get done. And we lack a John F. Kennedy to make that happen today.
Can anyone here imagine what this program would look like if two things were different. number one, that Nixon had let Apollo continue, it is a sure bet that this is what the end result would look like. Number two, if we had not wasted lives, time, and money, messing around in the wastelands of the middle east fighting for nothing.And instead spent the billions and billions wasted there on this project instead. A project that will benefit humanity and not just destroy lives. Any idiot can take a hammer and knock a hole in something and destroy! But a real man picks up a tool not to harm others but to create!!