Prepping for Orion's First Flight Into Space Next Year...

At a Lockheed Martin facility in Sunnyvale, California, engineers recently conducted various stress tests on the Launch Abort System (LAS) Fairing Assembly that will enshroud and protect the Orion spacecraft during the ascent to orbit on Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1...scheduled for September of 2014. The LAS assembly is only one of many pieces of flight hardware that will be tested this summer as preparations pick up for the maiden voyage of Orion that will take the vehicle to an altitude of 3,600 miles above the Earth. A few hours later, the capsule will re-enter our planet's atmosphere at a speed of over 20,000 mph—putting Orion's heat shield (which is undergoing final manufacturing at Textron Defense Systems in Boston, Massachusetts) through its paces, and thus seeing if NASA's newest spacecraft is indeed ready to take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit once more.


Lockheed Martin