From our friends at the Scotsman:
RESEMBLING the Apollo capsules that took man the Moon more than four decades ago, Nasa yesterday showed off the £320 million spacecraft from which astronauts will one day make their first foray on to Mars.
Orion, the most advanced spacecraft ever built, will take crews further and faster than ever before, carrying them on years-long voyages deep into the cosmos on what Nasa directors describe as missions to “surpass the boundaries within which humanity has been held”.
“This represents a new era of exploration beyond our planet, allowing us to go further than we have ever gone before. The future is here now,” said Bob Cabana, the director the Kennedy Space Centre (KSC), Florida.
Orion’s first flight, scheduled for 2014, will be an unmanned test mission known as EFT-1 – Exploration Flight Test 1. It would travel 3,600 miles from Earth – 15 times further than the International Space Station’s altitude. It will return through the atmosphere at 20,000mph for an ocean splashdown.
Because of the design, the speed and the angle at which it will re-enter, it will endure temperatures of up to 4,000F, hotter than any human spacecraft has encountered since the Moon missions of the 1960s and 70s.
EFT-1, designed to test the spacecraft’s performance, will be launched aboard a Delta IV heavy rocket. But by 2017, Nasa expects to have its new Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever created, ready to thrust Orion further into space on a second uncrewed mission.
Manned voyages to celestial destinations beyond lower Earth orbit will follow as soon as 2019, possibly starting with a lunar flyby and progressing to more ambitious destinations including an asteroid by 2025, Lagrange points – spots where the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon reach equilibrium – and ultimately the Red Planet in the 2030s.
Around 500 guests were on hand yesterday to welcome Orion to KSC, following several years of assembly in Louisiana. They included Florida senator Bill Nelson, a former shuttle astronaut, who led the charge in Congress to rescue and revitalize America’s flailing space programme following a period of political and budgetary turmoil.
“Isn’t this beautiful. The dream is alive,” he said, standing beside the spacecraft, which will undergo 18 months of further structural work including installation of its heatshield and avionics.
“We are going to Mars without question. We still need to refine how we are going to go there. We’ve got the develop a lot of new technologies, we’ve got to figure out how and where we stop along the way,” he said, reflecting concerns raised by Nasa veterans, including Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, who has criticised the Obama administration for having tasked Nasa with building a spaceship before exactly clarifying where it will go and when.
The vehicle’s arrival coincided with the space centre’s 50th birthday and represented what Nasa’s deputy chief, Lori Garver, described as “a magnificent golden anniversary present”.
Buildings and facilities used during America’s first 50 years of spaceflight are now being refurbished to accommodate the next generation of spaceships.
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Don’t get me started on this subject…
The money we’ve spent on the space program has come back to us many-fold in the form of new technologies and the boost it gives our national self esteem is immeasurable. Yeah, it’s an expensive endeavor, but we simply cannot afford not to be constantly moving forward in this area; there was a time when we owned space and we can again.
US Private industry exploiting near-Earth space and NASA spearheading planetary exploration -- that’s where the future lies.
Is Mr. “Muslim outreach” still with NASA? If so, he should be fired forthwith. In all honesty, the entire management structure of NASA needs to be vacated and rethought “from the ground, up”, so to speak.
You can change the management daily ’till the cows come home, but if you can’t re-capture the old spirit, yer just pissing up a rope. I still remember EXACTLY what it felt like in the 60s. That’s what’s needed…
Mike C. wrote:
I can’t argue any of that, we have a profound deficit in wonderment these days. There have been some outspoken, retired astronauts that feel the same way -- maybe they should be tapped for a re-build.
Hey boys, what it is?
They will not find signs of life anywhere
that Chuck Norris has already been.
I have wonderment. And awe. but then, i’m a geeky engineer. and a girl too! omg! a freak of nature!
@ Kirly:
Not so much -- the client’s Development Manager (the person in charge of the G&G and drilling and completions staff, and my boss) here is a lady petroleum engineer. Not all that uncommon these days.
@ Mike C.:
yes, it’s far more common than it used to be.
Mike C. wrote:
Not sure what you are talking about. The enthusiasm you felt? That warm thrill of ignorant space cadet glow? Management isn’t the problem, ignorance and unrealistic expectations are the problem. It’s damned near impossible to get folks like you excited about the fact that we are sending four people to Mars, but not until 2030.
I’m not trying to disrespect you, just I used to build this kind of stuff. Things I built are in orbit on the ISS and on Mars right now. I know how long it takes to design and build this stuff. Keeping the excitement level you are talking about is literally impossible.
I got my first look at blueprints for the Orion capsule 15 years ago, my FiL’s company was just beginning the composite materials verification analysis tests series. The company I used to work for building satellites, was still doing the third generation of those composite materials analysis tests in 2010.
I saw the anterior sub-shell for the Orion capsule back in 2008 (basically the capsules skeleton) and believe me, while the excitement level you feel might not be what the general public felt in 1969, the excitement level of the people building the Orion is every bit as high as it was for those building the Mercury and Apollo vehicles.
You are not seeing the every day in’s and out’s of the current mission to Mars. My family members and friends who are working on the Orion Project right now, they do. We talk about the small day to day progress. But the simple inescapable truth is, it isn’t race day yet.
The excitement you are thinking of is race day excitement. Right now, those people actively involved in the Orion Project, they don’t have race day fever, because they know that race day is still 20 years away. But do not make the foolish mistake of thinking that they are not extremely excited about what they are doing, or that management is screwing up because you don’t have race day fever for a race that doesn’t start for another 20 years.