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Six years Following Orion’s first spaceflight, America still waits to an encore

NASA's Orion spacecraft floats in the Pacific Ocean after splashdown from its first flight test in 2014.

Expand / NASA’s Orion spacecraft floats in the Pacific Ocean following splashdown out of its very first flight test in 2014. (charge: NASA)

The December sunrise felt optimistic because we stood out, seeing NASA’s Orion spacecraft series to the Florida skies. We might picture that America was still taking its first, tentative step to the future of human exploration of the cosmos.

“Here is the start of the Mars age,” the space agency’s secretary at the moment, former NASA astronaut Charlie Bolden, stated soon after the December 2014 launching. And at the present time, who would argue? This is a spacecraft capable of flying to the Moon and rear, acing its very first test in distance.

Six decades after, a number of the glow is gone{} gradually rusting brass. Years of waiting to get the encore to this trip have worn away a lot of their excitement that followed that this Exploration Flight Test-1 assignment. We’re supposed to have observed an encore flight of Orion 2 decades back along with also a mission carrying astronauts across the Moon next year. Rather, Orion is not likely to fly into space {} 2022, at the very first.

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