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Test Flight For NASA's Orion Capsule Slated for December 4
Space.com (which will also carry live web-cam coverage) reports that the Orion capsule is scheduled for a test flight, sans passengers, on Thursday, December 4th. For this test flight, Orion will make two orbits of Earth, with the second lap taking the capsule 15 times farther from the planet than the International Space Station. Officials have attached more than 1,000 sensors to the spacecraft to monitor its systems during flight.
Orion will also beam down images from its cameras as it is flying through space. NASA will use the information gathered during the test flight to make improvements to the spacecraft before humans set foot onboard.
The Houston Chronicle has an article with some excellent diagrams of the planned flight, the Orion capsule itself, as well as some of the technological and political history behind the project.
More like 30 years ago this should have been happening. Certainly a test flight like this should have happened some time within a couple of years after the loss of the Challenger. The singular failure of NASA to develop a system that will put people back into space has been an embarrassment for decades with dozens of systems that have been developed and even had "bent metal" like the Orion is right now. Yet except for the Shuttle, nothing has actually made the trip into space since Apollo. Even the Shuttle program had numerous set backs and budget cuts that nearly kept that from going into space.
Keep in mind, the Orion still hasn't gone into space, and the current configuration on a Delta Heavy isn't practical for anything other than possibly a mission to Low-Earth Orbit. I'm not even sure it can make the trip to the ISS with a crew with this configuration. When it is on the SLS, the ISS will never be a destination as there are no missions planned on that platform going there and certainly nothing funded by Congress.
Now, the question is, is there really any practical reason for manned deep-space flights at this point?
For that, you need to ask if space exploration in general is something worth doing? Presuming that there is something worth doing in space at all, you need eventually to put a crew there.
A far more important question to ask about Orion though is if this particular is a practical method of travel into space in the first place? At a price of $1-$2 billion per flight, it seems there ought to be a much cheaper way to get people into space.