NASA’s troubled Orion project set for launch on test flight
Print Edition
NASA’S multi-billion dollar Orion capsule is poised for its first test launch tomorrow, in a demonstration flight that aims to propel it higher than any spacecraft meant to carry humans in 40 years.
After launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida atop a powerful Delta IV rocket at 7:05am, the unmanned spacecraft should circle the Earth twice and reach a height of 5,800 kilometers, more than 15 times the altitude of the orbiting International Space Station.
The crew capsule is scheduled to make a splash landing in the Pacific Ocean about four and a half hours later.
The weather forecast for launch is 60 percent favorable, with the potential for showers and high winds raising some doubts about liftoff. The launch window stays open for two hours and 39 minutes.
The Orion space capsule was initially supposed to carry astronauts to the Moon as part of NASA’s Constellation program, which was canceled by President Barack Obama in 2010.
NASA rescued the design for the capsule — on which it spent US$4.7 billion from 2005 to 2009 — and said it could easily be repurposed to send people to an asteroid or Mars in the coming decades.
A successful test flight would be a boon to the US space program, which has been unable to send astronauts into orbit since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011.
It would also settle some nerves after two recent commercial space flight disasters — the explosion of an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket in late October on its way to the ISS, and just days later, the crash of Virgin SpaceShipTwo that killed one of two pilots.
The Orion test flight is “absolutely the biggest thing that this agency is going to do this year,” said William Hill, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development.
Orion would be the first spacecraft of its kind to travel so far since the Apollo missions to the Moon in the 60s and 70s.
Key performance tests include the multi-stage rocket separation, the elevated radiation and scorching heat of 2,200 degrees Celsius that the spacecraft’s 4-centimeter thick heat shield will endure, and the parachute-aided splashdown southwest of San Diego, California.
The return will simulate a journey back from the Moon.
Critics of the Orion project — which also involves the construction of the world’s most powerful rockets, Space Launch System (SLS), to propel it into space — point to expense and lack of focus as key problems.
The latest estimate by NASA pegs the development cost for SLS/Orion at between US$19 billion and US$22 billion, up from a prior estimate of US$18 billion.
The rising costs add to what space analyst Marco Caceres described as the “painful fact that the rocket doesn’t actually have a mission.”
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
