NASA Shows Off Mock-Up of Mars-Capable Spacecraft

N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer." They're still working on the parachute.

Comments

Re:How many years have they been working on this?

[beejhuff]

I (for once) RTFA, and from what I gathered, they've developed this module and updated launcher to provide an effective round trip mechanism for Moon expeditions, where they will practice the operations that will be required when a full scale Mars mission is executed (sometime around between 2020-2030). I think the important point is that NASA is realizing that the shuttle is not an effective mission system for the next generation of Moon missions, which are a pre-req for any future Mars missions.

To me, this actually sounds like a sober assessment - and one that is long overdue.