Orion blazed into the morning sky at 7:05 a.m. EST, Friday, Dec. 5, 2014, in Florida. Lifting off from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Orion crew module splashed down approximately 4.5 hours later in the Pacific Ocean, 600 miles southwest of San Diego. During splashdown and recovery the Orion was tracked by a NASA Ikhana UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) from the air.
Construction has begun on the first new NASA orbit-bound, human spacecraft to be built in 20 years. Engineers at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans have started welding together the first Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. The craft is scheduled for a test flight in 2013, during which the unmanned vehicle will orbit the Earth several times. NASA's last spacecraft built to orbit humans was space shuttle Endeavour, which was completed in 1991.
NASA has unveiled a new look and name for its previously planned moon capsule.
The crew capsule named Orion was a cornerstone of former President George W. Bush's plan to return astronauts to the moon. A year ago, President Barack Obama scrapped the moon mission but saved Orion - possibly for an escape pod at the International Space Station. Read more
The Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MCPV) is based on the Orion design requirements for traveling beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The MPCV will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities. Read more
If ping-pong balls can float a sunken boat, they should be able to keep an uncrewed space capsule simulator from sinking. Right?
That's what a team of summer students and engineers think at NASA's Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Va. Langley is fabricating a proposed design of an astronaut crew module simulator for uncrewed flight-testing as part of the agency's effort to build a vehicle to replace the space shuttle. Read more
NASA's Pad Abort 1 flight test, a launch of the abort system designed for the Orion crew vehicle, lifted off at 7 a.m. MDT Thursday at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Las Cruces, N.M. The flight lasted about 135 seconds from launch until the crew module touchdown about a mile north of the launch pad. Read more
NASA engineers catapult new Orion crew capsule into New Mexico desert to test abort system
NASA engineers catapulted the new Orion crew capsule about a mile into the air Thursday morning as hundreds of people gathered to watch. The launch at White Sands Missile Range in the barren southern New Mexico desert left a stream of white smoke as the unmanned capsule arched through the sky, deployed a parachute and landed about a mile north of the launch site. Read more
A full-scale mockup of NASA's Orion crew module is being tested in the water off the coast of Kennedy Space Centre in Florida the week of April 6. The spacecraft mock-up travelled from the Naval Surface Warfare Centre's Carderock Division in Bethesda, Md., to Kennedy. The goal of the operation, dubbed the Post-landing Orion Recovery Test, or PORT, is to determine what kind of motion astronauts can expect after landing, as well as outside conditions for recovery teams.