After a 26-day journey that took it to lunar orbit and back, the uncrewed Orion spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday afternoon, paving the way for future astronaut voyages to Earth’s satellite
Fifty years ago today humans landed on the lunar surface for the last time during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission. And now, after a journey of 1.4 million miles, NASA’s Orion spacecraft is safely back on Earth—marking the completion of the agency’s Artemis I mission and the first step toward returning humans to the moon.
The most crucial—and dangerous—test happened today, when Orion left space and made its high-speed return to Earth. Traveling about 25,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft performed what’s called a skip reentry, briefly dipping in and out of the atmosphere’s outskirts to bleed off speed before making a second, final plunge. The next time it touched Earth’s air, instead of skimming across the atmosphere like a skipping stone, Orion dove all the way through.
A Smooth Shakedown Cruise Just after 1:45 A.M. ET on November 16, NASA’s orange-hued SLS rocket roared to life and blazed into the sky, illuminating Florida’s Space Coast in an artificial dawn. The launch was a triumph: this was the largest rocket humans have so far sent into space and the first time in a half-century that a crew-rated spacecraft would visit the vicinity of the moon. These milestones came after years of delays in development and testing, during which costs ballooned.
Things proceeded so swimmingly, in fact, that as the mission progressed, managers felt confident enough to conduct additional, on-the-fly tests of the spacecraft’s capability. And in the end, it all worked. NEA Scout is presumed lost, having yet to make contact with the ground; its team doesn’t even know whether the spacecraft ever powered on. A Japanese CubeSat, OMOTENASHI, was meant to send a small lander to the lunar surface, but it spun out of control after deployment, preventing further operations. LunaH-Map, another NASA CubeSat, failed to perform a crucial propulsion maneuver and now can’t complete its goal of mapping ice deposits around the moon’s south pole.
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