Despite the savvy NASA public relations campaign
tied to the release of Ridley Scott’s The
Martian, America’s beleaguered human spaceflight
program still took a step back during
September. The first launch to carry humans on
NASA’s new deep space crew vehicle has slipped
until 2023 — nearly two years later than previously
planned.
The slip isn’t the program’s first.
That crew vehicle, now known as Orion, was
first announced in 2004 following the Space
Shuttle Columbia disaster, as part of a program
that would replace previous proposed space
plane designs and return humans to the Moon “as
early as 2015.” The course was soon reimagined as
the Constellation program, and then eventually
canceled itself in 2009 after a review found it was
underfunded and far behind schedule. But not
long after, a compromise mission was announced
that would keep Orion and instead send humans
to an asteroid and on to Mars in the 2030s.
Then, in December 2014, Orion was finally
launched for the first time and became the first
crew-capable spacecraft launched beyond low-
Earth orbit since Apollo. The rocket built to carry
Orion, the Space Launch System, is due to see its
first launch in 2018. And, following more tests, the
two were set for an initial crewed launch in 2021.
But as NASA battles Congress to fully fund
the private spacecraft it has contracted to supply
the International Space Station, the agency announced
September 16 that without its requested
funds, Orion’s first crewed launch could slip some
20 months.
Some in Congress called the delay a political
tactic because NASA wasn’t getting the funding
it wanted, but the space agency says technical
hurdles have cost Orion time as well. —
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