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rfmcdonaldNational Geographic News' Dan Vergano reports on the successful test flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft.
Unmanned for this test flight, the Orion space capsule successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:29 a.m. EST, after a 20,000 mile per hour (32,000 kilometer per hour) plunge through the atmosphere.
"A picture-perfect splashdown," said NASA's Amber Philman, from a ship some 630 miles (1,014 kilometers) southwest of San Diego that is recovering the floating capsule.
"This is NASA, very slowly, on its way to deep space again," said space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The next test of the space capsule comes in 2018, with another unmanned mission that will take the capsule into orbit around the moon.
Orion is intended to carry four astronauts aloft on 21-day missions that will fly higher than low Earth orbit, beyond the altitude of the International Space Station, which travels only 270 miles (430 kilometers) up. The capsule's reentry test was designed to show whether its new heat shields could withstand temperatures of 4,000°F (2,200°C) as it passed through the atmosphere on its high-speed return from deep space missions.
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This reentry test was a trial run for the capsule, part of a decade-long, $9-billion development effort by NASA intended to eventually carry astronauts on deep-space missions. If funding comes through, Orion will help carry astronauts on an asteroid exploration mission around 2025, and perhaps someday to a deep space habitation vehicle for future years-long trips to Mars.
