NASA's Orion Spaceship Passes Parachute Test 75
An anonymous reader writes The spacecraft it is hoped will take man to Mars has passed its first parachute tests. Nasa's Orion spacecraft landed gently using its parachutes after being shoved out of a military jet at 35,000 feet. "We've put the parachutes through their paces in ground and airdrop testing in just about every conceivable way before we begin sending them into space on Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 before the year's done," Orion program manager Mark Geyer said in a NASA statement. "The series of tests has proven the system and will help ensure crew and mission safety for our astronauts in the future."
Re:Help!! (Score:4, Informative)
As I understand it, Orion is sort of the equivalent of the Apollo CM. It was not cancelled.
However, what I believe the administration wants to cancel is part of the SLS (Shuttle Launch System) which would lift the Orion capsule into orbit--sort of the equivalent of the Saturn 1B that was used to launch Apollo capsules into earth orbit for Skylab and Apollo/Soyuz missions.
I believe the heavy-lift version of SLS--sort of analogous to the Saturn 5--is still funded for the asteroid missions.
Re:Why bother? (Score:0, Informative)
I know, right? The Democrat president who introduced the Vision for Space Exploration [wikipedia.org] in 2004 really had vision. Return to the Moon, then on to Mars, and all in an ambitious timeframe.
I was so disappointed when the Republican president scrapped it in 2010 in favor of just retooling old hardware so his cronies could keep making the same hardware they'd been making for 30 years. Damn those Republicans and their willingness to scrap billions of dollars in research and development in order to start over again with inferior designs!
Re:I really wish they named the ship something els (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I really wish they named the ship something els (Score:2, Informative)