Orion Spaceship Blasts Off in First Test on the Road to Mars
PE CANAVERAL, Fla. — America’s most powerful rocket launched a robotic test version of NASA’s Orion deep-space capsule on its first flight on Friday, a day after a series of snags forced a scrub of the first attempt.
The United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket’s liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station had to be postponed on Thursday — at first due to gusty winds, and later due to a balky fuel valve. But on Friday, no technical issues or weather snags got in the way of an on-time 7:05 a.m. ET launch, even though the clouds were thick over Florida’s Space Coast.
“Liftoff at dawn! The dawn of Orion, for a new era of American space exploration!” launch commentator Mike Curie said as the rocket blasted through the clouds.
NASA launches new Orion spacecraftTODAY
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 portrays Friday’s 4.5-hour test flight as a first step toward deep-space exploration. The mission is known as Exploration Flight Test 1, or EFT-1.
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