NASA unveils new project, hopes to go to Mars

The new Orion Exploration Vehicle was unveiled today at the National Mall; plans are underway for missions “to Mars and beyond,” said Alan Rhodes of NASA. Water safety testing on the vehicle will commence next week, and when ready, its first mission will be a 2015 journey to the International Space Station.

The vehicle bears resemblance to the Apollo spacecraft from the 1960s on the outside, but on the inside, it is almost double in size. The crew on Orion will be six people, whereas Apollo could hold three. Much of the design preparation for Orion was based off of designs from the 1960s in order to reduce cost. An engineer from Lockheed Martin explained, “The physics never changed,” so they were able to make use of the original research.

NASA plans to use Orion for many different missions in the future. The vehicle has potential to go to the space station, the Moon, and Mars. The trip to Mars, however, is very daunting: a six-month journey, two-year stay, and six-month return. As of now, science is not advanced enough to handle the duration of this trip. The plan for Orion is to have a man on the Moon for six months in 2020 to test the feasibility of the Mars journey.

“This is your vehicle,” Alan Rhodes explained to a group of students, noting that NASA encourages input for improvements to the system and to the next generation of space travel.