Orion Spacecraft Splashes Down After High Orbit Test

NASA's unmanned Orion spacecraft has successfully splashed down about 250 miles west of La Paz, Mexico, in the Pacific Ocean after a liftoff, two orbits and re-entry that lasted just under 4½ hours.

Orion, which could one day take astronauts to Mars, made a "bulls-eye splashdown" at 8:29 a.m. PST, Mission Control said, after the spacecraft endured a searing 4,000-degree Fahrenheit re-entry and was carried to the ocean surface under four giant red-and-white parachutes.

Mission Control called the first test of the capsule a "picture perfect" mission that had surmounted "significant milestones" for the program that could eventually pave the way for putting astronauts on the surface of the Red Planet.

As we reported, NASA scrubbed yesterday's launch at Cape Canaveral, Florida, because it could not resolve a number of technical issues. Today's launch went off without a hitch.

Here's some background:

"As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reported earlier this week, Orion is expected to make two orbits at a distance of 3,600 miles from the Earth's surface on its second lap, before conducting a re-entry burn and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

"The flight is meant to validate the vehicle's basic systems, including avionics, heat shielding and parachutes.

"According to Geoff: 'It's designed for deep space, but Orion's first mission will be back to the neighborhood of the moon. The plan is to have a robot capture a small asteroid and drag it back to lunar orbit. Then Orion will carry up to four astronauts to meet it. It's all supposed to happen in the 2020s, though some say the mission is too complicated and not much of an advance.' "

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Bay Area Engineers Prepped Orion for Test Flight

Engineers at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View tested Orion's heat shield using specially developed sensors and the center's Arc Jet Facility -- which is designed to simulate the spacecraft's re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. They also tested Orion's systems in a wind tunnel and the Ames Horizontal Free Flight Facility, which "can fire models through a 75-foot-long test chamber at speeds ranging from 500 to 18,000 mph."