SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
On Tuesday, Orion will fly 55 seconds before violently escaping from its rocket
Nearly five years have passed since NASA first launched its Orion spacecraft to an apogee of 5,800km above the Earth, completing a successful test flight of the capsule intended to carry astronauts to lunar orbit in the 2020s.
Now, NASA is preparing for its second Orion launch, although this flight will be considerably shorter. On Tuesday morning, NASA intends to launch a boilerplate version of Orion—essentially a well instrumented vehicle without any life-support equipment or many other critical systems—on top of a solid rocket booster built by Northrop Grumman.
The rocket is actually an old Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile, now refurbished for commercial purposes. It will launch the Orion to an altitude of nearly 9.5km above the Florida coast in order to test Orion's launch abort system at the point of maximum dynamic pressure. This will occur about 55 seconds after launch.
Testing the full expendable rocket system would be painful... for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02 2019, @07:18PM
And you're complaining about 15 years and 16 billion for a crew capsule that can go into space, after 30 years without one?
While I still think the Orion Capsule is an obscene waste of resources, give what else the government is obscenely wasting resources on, I would at least like to see Americans in deeper space again in my lifetime.