NASA plans unmanned Orion flight in early 2014

NASA plans to add an unmanned flight test of the Orion spacecraft in early 2014 to its contract with Lockheed Martin Space Systems for the multipurpose crew vehicle's design, development, test and evaluation, the U.S. space agency announced Tuesday. This test supports the new Space Launch System (SLS) that will take astronauts farther into space than ever before, and provide the cornerstone for America's future human spaceflight efforts. "President Obama and Congress have laid out an ambitious space exploration plan, and NASA is moving out quickly to implement it," NASA Associate Administrator for Communications David Weaver said in a statement. "This flight test will provide invaluable data to support the deep space exploration missions this nation is embarking upon." Orion is part of the now defunct Constellation program canceled under President Barack Obama's 2011 budget proposal. Instead Obama urged NASA to work toward sending humans to an asteroid and then on to Mars -- and NASA says it wants to go ahead with that as quickly as possible. This Exploration Flight Test, or EFT-1, will fly two orbits to a high-apogee, with a high-energy re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. Orion will make a water landing and be recovered using operations planned for future human exploration missions. The test mission will be launched from Cape Canaveral to acquire critical re-entry flight performance data and demonstrate early integration capabilities that benefit the Orion, SLS. "The entry part of the test will produce data needed to develop a spacecraft capable of surviving speeds greater than 20,000 mph and safely return astronauts from beyond Earth orbit," Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier said. "This test is very important to the detailed design process in terms of the data we expect to receive."