CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA's Orion deep-space capsule hit a historic peak during its first robotic test flight on Friday, and then splashed down into the Pacific Ocean for a picture-perfect ending.

On the way down, the cone-shaped spacecraft went through a "trial by fire" during which the heat of atmospheric re-entry rose as high as 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or twice the heat of molten lava.

"America has driven a golden spike as it crosses a bridge into the future," NASA spokesman Rob Navias declared as Orion hit the water, 275 miles west of Baja California, at 11:29 a.m. ET. Recovery ships converged to bring the capsule back to shore.

The finale came less than four and a half hours after Orion's launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. On Thursday, gusty winds and a balky fuel valve kept the United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket grounded, but nothing went wrong on Friday.

"Liftoff at dawn! The dawn of Orion, and a new era of American space exploration!" launch commentator Mike Curie said, as the rocket blasted through the clouds just after sunrise at 7:05 a.m. ET.

NASA and its commercial partners are designing Orion to take astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the 2020s, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s. For that reason, NASA portrayed Friday's test flight as a first step toward deep-space exploration. The mission is known as Exploration Flight Test 1, or EFT-1.

"I would describe it as the beginning of the Mars era," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said on NASA TV.

Orion's flight marked the first time since the Apollo 17 moon mission in 1972 that a vehicle designed to carry humans went beyond low Earth orbit.

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 made its first circuit around the planet, the rocket's upper stage kicked it into a second, highly eccentric orbit that looped 3,604.2 miles from Earth. That's 15 times farther away than the International Space Station.

Here is the original post:

Blastoff! 'Mars Era' Begins With Orion Test Flight