The US spaceship designed to one day fly astronauts to Mars made a near-bullseye splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, wrapping up a flawless, unmanned debut test flight around Earth.
The Orion capsule blasted off aboard a Delta 4 heavy rocket, the biggest in the US fleet, just after dawn from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Three hours later, it reached peak altitude of 5,800km (3,604 miles) above the planet, a prelude to the most challenging part of the flight, a 32,000km/h (20,000mph) dive back into the atmosphere.
Orion survived a searing, plunge through the atmosphere, heating up to 2,200 degrees – twice as hot as molten lava – and experiencing gravitational forces eight times stronger than Earth’s.
Over the next few minutes, 11 parachutes deployed to slow Orion's descent, including three gigantic main chutes that guided the spaceship to a 32km/h splashdown 1,014km southwest of San Diego, California, at almost 4.30pm Irish time.
"I think it's a big day for the world, for people who know and like space," said Nasa administrator Charles Bolden before the launch.
Lead-in period
The point of the test flight, which cost the space agency about $375 million, (€300 million) was to verify that Orion’s five metre diameter heat shield, parachutes, avionics and other equipment would work as designed prior to astronauts flying aboard.
Nasa has been developing Orion, along with a new heavy-lift rocket, for more than eight years. The design of the rocket has changed, and Orion survived the cancellation of a lunar exploration programme called Constellation to become the centrepiece of an initiative intended to one day fly astronauts to Mars.
Nasa has spent more than $9 billion developing the Lockheed Martin Corp-built Orion, which will make a second test flight, also without crew, in about four years.
A third mission, expected about 2021, will include two astronauts on a flight that will send the capsule high around the moon. Since the end of the Apollo moon programme in 1972, astronauts have flown only a few hundred miles above Earth.
Orion's debut flight originally had been slated for Thursday but a problem with the rocket, built and flown by United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed and Boeing, delayed the launch day.
Reuters