A spaceship built to carry humans is about to venture into deep space for the first time in more than four decades. <\/p>\n
NASA'sOrion space capsuleis scheduled to blast off on its first test flight Thursday (Dec. 4). The unmanned mission, called Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), will send Orion zooming about 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) from Earth, before rocketing back to the planet at high speeds to test out the capsule's heat shield, avionics and a variety of other systems. <\/p>\n
No human-spaceflight vehicle has traveled so far since 1972, when the last of NASA's Apollo moon missions came back to Earth. Indeed, in all that time, no craft designed to carry crews has made it beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO), just a few hundred miles from the planet. [Photos: NASA's Orion Space Capsule EFT-1 Test Flight] <\/p>\n
If all goes according to plan, Orion will eventually fly farther than any Apollo capsule ever did, taking astronauts to near-Earth asteroids and by the mid-2030s the ultimate destination,Mars. <\/p>\n
\"I gotta tell you, this is special,\" Bob Cabana, director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said about EFT-1 during a press briefing last month. \"This is our first step on that journey to Mars.\" <\/p>\n
Getting people safely to and from destinations in deep space poses challenges that the engineers of NASA's last crewed spaceship, the now-retiredspace shuttle, never had to consider. (No space shuttle ever traveled beyond Earth orbit.) <\/p>\n
For example, if a problem develops aboard a spaceship in LEO, astronauts can theoretically be on the ground in less than an hour. But it would take days for a vehicle out by the moon or beyond to get home, said NASA Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer. <\/p>\n
\"So you've gotta have highly reliable systems, and you've gotta have capabilities to protect the crew in case of a contingency,\" he said during last month's briefing. [The Orion Capsule: NASA's Next Spaceship (Photos)] <\/p>\n
One such capabilitiy will allow crewmembers aboard Orion to survive in their spacesuits for up to six days if the capsule gets depressurized, Geyer added. <\/p>\n
\"So if we have a totally depressed cabin, they can be in their suits and we can get them home,\" he said. <\/p>\n
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New manned spaceship a stepping stone to Mars, says NASA<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A spaceship built to carry humans is about to venture into deep space for the first time in more than four decades. NASA'sOrion space capsuleis scheduled to blast off on its first test flight Thursday (Dec Continue reading