NASA readies a manned return to deep space with Orion launch

After 42 years in low-earth orbit, NASA is planning to send astronauts back out into deep space.

The first step in this bold new journey comes tomorrow morning (December 4), with Exploration Flight Test 1, an unmanned test flight of the agency’s new Orion spacecraft.

During a four-hour mission, Orion and its systems will be given a full shakedown. Initially, the spacecraft will settle into an elliptical low-earth orbit of 185 kilometres by 888 kilometres. Then, Orion’s second-stage rockets will take it through the Van Allen Belt and into a deep space orbit, some 5,808 kilometres from Earth. After jettisoning its service module, Orion will then de-orbit and return home, entering the Earth’s atmosphere at some 32,000 kilometres per hour, and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

While similar in appearance to the 1960s-era Apollo spacecraft, Orion is in fact all-new, and NASA’s first human-rated spacecraft since the Space Shuttle in the 1970s. With a four-person command module built by Lockheed-Martin and a service module built by the European Space Agency and Airbus, Orion is a next-generation design built to return astronauts to the moon, on to asteroids, and eventually to Mars. 

During initial test flights, the 29,000-kilogram Orion will be carried into space by a Delta IV Heavy rocket—with 900,000-kilogram-force thrust, currently the most powerful in NASA’s fleet—but work is under way on something even bigger. With 4.5 million kilogram-force thrust, the Space Launch System will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed when it is completed in 2018. 

With an overall estimated cost of US$18 billion (US$6 billion for Orion, US$10 billion for the SLS, and US$2 billion for launch facility upgrades), the program is not without its detractors. Still, NASA estimates that future Orion launches will cost approximately US$500,000,000—less than half the launch cost (adjusted for inflation) of the nine Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s 

With a two-hour and 39-minute launch window beginning at 4:05 a.m. PST, and an upgraded meteorological report indicating a 70 percent chance of good weather, things are looking favourable for an on-time launch. 

Orion’s first manned flight is scheduled for 2021.