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NASA's Orion Capsule Reaches Orbit
PaisteUser sends word that NASA's Orion capsule successfully reached orbit this morning after a flawless launch atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket. Video of the launch is available on YouTube, and the Orion Mission blog has frequent updates as mission milestones are reached.
Mission managers said the rocket and capsule performed perfectly during the initial phases of the test. "It was just a blast to see how well the rocket did," said Mark Geyer, NASA's Orion program manager. After Orion makes its first circuit around the planet, the rocket's upper stage will kick it into a second, highly eccentric orbit that loops as far as 3,600 miles from Earth. Then Orion will come screaming back into Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 mph — 80 percent of the velocity that a spacecraft returning from the moon would experience. This particular Orion is missing a lot of the components that would be needed for a crewed flight, and it won't be carrying humans. Instead, it's outfitted with more than 1,200 sensors to monitor how its communication and control systems deal with heightened radiation levels, how its heat shield handles re-entry temperatures that are expected to rise as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and how its parachutes slow the craft down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
The capabilities of the rocket.
To be pedantic: the rocket's capabilities were known, but the capsule's capabilities (heat shield, rad shielding, chutes, etc) needed testing. Large, complex systems on whose function lives will depend should be checked and tested in at least one realistic run before crews are committed to them.
This is the "trial by fire" they need to see if you can leave earth orbit in the Orion capsule. They're taking it out on a long burn to pass through the inner Van Allen belt which ought to give them all the info they need on radiation exposure and its effects on the capsule's systems. Then they get to find out how well the heat shield holds up on re-entry (at that speed the shield should reach 4000 degrees F).
All of this is also completely automated, which is a bonus feature for safety reasons if the crew ever gets incapacitated.
Most of the command module avionics, control system, fore and aft heat shield, power and thermal subsystem, and recovery systems like the parachute system.
Quite a few things, actually,
Here is a blog reporting lift to the second orbit: http://space.io9.com/will-orio...
What great news to wake up to! Hoping for many more optimism-promoting successes like this on the road to humans living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal or lunar ores.
Here is a PBS NewsHour video with launch footage:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up...
BTW, that PBS NewsHour Orion article led me to another PBS NewsHour article which formed the basis of my most recent "optimistic" Slashdot story submission on how restoring 1970s overtime regulations could boost the US economy:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
With a stronger economy, maybe there would be even more demand for space-related ventures of all sorts?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
NASA could only do what Congress gave them the money to do. Same could be said with the SSC. The Luddites we kept sending to Congress made sure that the money Congress appropriated for federal spending, federal subsidies, and federal tax relief benefited the "people" who put them there. As in - not us, but - their real financial contributors. Remember - you get the NASA and the Congress that you pay for!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."