Rising on a tongue of flame and easing to a gentle splashdown in the Pacific Ocean nearly 4-1/2 hours later, the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations newest spaceship for human exploration made its debut earlier this month in a virtually flawless initial test flight.

Dubbed Orion, the craft has been hailed as NASAs first step toward putting humans on Mars by the 2030s. Indeed, its purpose is to reinvigorate the agencys human spaceflight program in the post-shuttle era.

But look deeper at Orions potential path to Mars, and the assumptions surrounding it, and the way ahead appears to be littered with question marks.

What will Orion do before then? Will it make enough flights to justify the program? Are NASA budgets big enough to develop the technologies needed for interim missions, let alone realistically fund a trip to Mars? In a time of fiscal austerity, will subsequent presidents and Congresses even want to make that commitment?

Since the last American set boots on the moon in 1972, politicians and NASA officials have struggled with a stubborn question: What now? The money needed to send humans to intriguing places beyond low-Earth orbit is, well, astronomical. The fall of the Soviet Union made it harder politically to justify such big budgets for human spaceflight.

Orion and its goal of a journey to Mars give NASA a fresh start. And the agency is already applying lessons learned from the recent past, looping in other countries to help pick up the tab for the spacecraft.

But the question remains: Can NASA execute a human space-exploration program on tight budgets? With Mars rovers and probes sent to the outer solar system, NASA has worked wonders with its unmanned missions. In many ways, Orion and the journey to Mars represent a test of whether the agency can do the same with its manned-exploration program.

On the plus side, Americas astronaut corps appears to be excited again.

I think youd be hard-pressed to find an astronaut past, present, or future who wouldnt love to fly in Orion, said Rex Walheim, a space shuttle mission specialist and an astronaut liaison to the team building the craft, following the Dec. 5 test flight. This is the true exploration that we live for.

But NASAs current plans for human exploration of space could span six presidential elections and a dozen sessions of Congress. How solid or consistent will Washingtons willingness to send astronauts on deep-space exploration missions be?

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Can NASA's Orion program reinvigorate human spaceflight? (+video)