Launching Orion

NASA is pushing to bring the first test flight of the Orion capsule, being built by Lochheed Martin, forward three years into 2014.

Orion is designed to carry astronauts on deep space missions. and NASA wants the early, unmanned test flight to judge how ready Orion would be for such missions. The idea is to put Orion into an Earth orbit having an apogee of about 5,000 miles and letting it barrel back to a splashdown on Earth from there, thus simulating the speed, and therefore the re-entry heat, associated with a return from deep space.