Tag: Orion
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Artemis 1 Orion returns to KSC after Plum Brook testing
Riding aboard NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft, the Orion spacecraft that will fly the Artemis 1 lunar orbit mission returned home to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on March 25 after four months of development testing in Ohio. The mated Crew Service Module (CSM) combo spent weeks in the thermal vacuum chamber of the…
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NASA decides against using Gateway for 2024 lunar landing
As NASA organizes a push to return a human presence to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era, the agency has made critical changes to the plan that would enable a crewed lunar landing to occur no later than 2024. One of these modifications involved the Lunar Gateway, a modular space station…
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Artemis 1 Orion halfway through Plum Brook thermal vacuum test
The NASA Orion spacecraft that will fly the Artemis 1 lunar orbit mission is about halfway through two months of around the clock thermal vacuum testing at Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, Ohio. NASA and prime contractor Lockheed Martin are collecting data on the spacecraft’s behavior and performance while it operates in simulated deep space…
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Aerojet Rocketdyne signs on the bottom line to build hardware for moon missions
Lockheed Martin’s Mike Hawes and Scott Jones sign copies of a contract for Orion rocket hardware, after Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Ken Young and Cheryl Rehm take their turn. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) REDMOND, Wash. — Representatives of Aerojet Rocketdyne and Lockheed Martin put their signatures on a contract for up to $170 million worth of…
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NASA conducting data deep dive following July’s Orion ascent abort test
Following the successful July Ascent Abort-2 (AA-2) test of the Launch Abort System (LAS) for NASA’s Orion crewed spacecraft, the space agency is reviewing the data collected with its contractors. The supersonic, low-altitude test carried about three dozen flight test objectives, and engineers are going through all the data collected in the short test to…
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One on one ESA Director General Johann-Dietrich Wörner
Last Sunday (October 6th) the annual ESA-ESTEC open house day was held on the grounds of Europe’s largest Space facility, ESTEC in the Netherlands. This open day is part of world space week – and the week of science. This year’s theme of the open day was “Europe to the Moon”. Among the special guests…
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NASA’s Orion spacecraft program gets a multibillion-dollar vote of support
The Orion crew capsule meant for NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 mission around the moon and back is being prepared for its flight. (NASA Photo / Radislav Sinyak) NASA says it’s ordering three more Orion spacecraft for missions to the moon, at a cost of $2.7 billion — and plans to order as many as nine…
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Propulsion test article demonstrates Orion abort stress case at White Sands
NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), and contractor personnel conducted an Abort To Orbit (ATO) test case last week for the Orion spacecraft using the Propulsion Qualification Module (PQM) at the White Sands Test Facility (WSTF) in New Mexico. The team at White Sands ran the PQM through a twelve-minute long sequence of engine firings to…
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Pence delivers a promise, and a warning, to NASA and its contractors
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION Vice President Mike Pence speaks Saturday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: Office of the Vice President Despite appearances and a presidential tweet suggesting otherwise, the United States is “100%” committed to sending astronauts back to the moon in 2024 and establishing a long-term, sustainable presence…
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Waiting for Artemis 1 schedule update, official decision on SLS Green Run
A flurry of initiatives announced early in March to find a way to fly Exploration Mission-1 by this time next year were supposed to be complete by now, but NASA has not announced findings or decisions on speeding up schedules and eliminating typical development testing. All of NASA’s internal reviews of the pre-launch assembly and…