CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s new Orion spacecraft will have to wait another day to fly.
Wind gusts and a sticky rocket valve forced the Cape Canaveral launch team to call off Thursday’s attempt to send Orion into orbit on its first-ever test flight.
NASA promised to try again Friday.
Orion is how NASA hopes to one day send astronauts to Mars. This inaugural flight, while just 4½ hours, will send the unmanned capsule 3,600 miles into space.
High winds twice halted Thursday morning’s countdown with less than four minutes remaining. Then a valve in the unmanned Delta IV (four) rocket malfunctioned at the three-minute mark. Launch controllers scrambled to check all of these so-called “fill and drain” valves in the three first-stage booster engines. But time ran out.
–ORIGINAL STORY BELOW–
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA stood poised to usher in a new era of exploration Thursday with the premier launch of its new Orion spacecraft.
The unmanned test flight was set to begin with a sunrise liftoff.
It’s the first attempt to send a spacecraft capable of carrying humans beyond a couple hundred miles of Earth since the Apollo moon program.
The ultimate goal, in the decades ahead, is to use Orion to carry people to Mars and back.
NASA anticipated 26,000 guests for the sunrise send-off, and the atmosphere at Kennedy Space Center was reminiscent of the shuttle-flying days.
Orion is aiming for two orbits on this inaugural run. On the second lap around the home planet, the spacecraft should reach a peak altitude of 3,600 miles, high enough to ensure a re-entry speed of 20,000 mph and an environment of 4,000 degrees. Splashdown will be in the Pacific off the Mexican Baja coast, where Navy ships already are waiting.
NASA’s Mission Control in Houston was all set to oversee the entire 4½-hour operation. The flight program was loaded into Orion’s computers well in advance, allowing the spacecraft to fly essentially on autopilot. Flight controllers could intervene in the event of an emergency breakdown.
The spacecraft is rigged with 1,200 sensors to gauge everything from heat to vibration to radiation. At 11 feet tall with a 16.5-foot base, Orion is bigger than the old-time Apollo capsules and, obviously, more advanced. As NASA’s program manager Mark Geyer noted, “The inside of the capsule is totally different.”
NASA deliberately kept astronauts off this first Orion.
Managers want to test the riskiest parts of the spacecraft — the heat shield, parachutes, various jettisoning components — before committing to a crew. The earliest Orion might carry passengers is 2021; asteroids are on the space agency’s radar sometime in the 2020s and Mars, the grand prize, in the 2030s.
Lockheed Martin Corp., which is handling the $370 million test flight for NASA, opted for the powerful Delta IV rocket this time around. Future Orion missions will rely on NASA’s still-in-development megarocket known as SLS, or Space Launch System. The first Orion-SLS combo launch is targeted for 2018.
NASA’s last trip beyond low-Earth orbit in a vessel built for people was Apollo 17 in December 1972.
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