Orion’s Progress

Welding on Orion

Image courtesy of NASA

Orion’s Progress
| published August 16, 2015 |

By Keith H. Roberts Thursday Review contributor

The deep space exploration project known as Orion is moving slowly but measurably toward its planned launch sometime within the next few years. Engineers and designers at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Plant in New Orleans are currently working on the critical welding processes for Orion’s crew module, before additional welding will begin on the larger spacecraft for the first major mission, dubbed Exploration 1.

What is being assembled now is not a mock-up or a smaller test version, but a "pathfinder" for the first full-scale crew module. The pathfinder will be used to design and develop the thousands of other parts and technologies for the first working version.  Once completed the Orion crew component will ride atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, a versatile booster designed—among other things—to propel Orion into deep space, including missions to Mars, the Asteroid Belt, and beyond in the next decades.

Related Thursday Review articles:

Biomedical Experiments on Space Station; Keith H. Roberts; Thursday Review; August 6, 2015.

Orion is Older Than You Think; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; December 9, 2014.