NASA Preps for Orion's Big Splash

NASA and the US Navy could be found splashing in the Pacific Ocean early last week. However, this wasn't the deserved downtime you might think it was. The agency and military branch have been exhaustively running scenarios for the re-entry and landing of the new Orion spacecraft, which is expected to splashdown at the conclusion of its flight test in December.

"We learned a lot about our hardware, gathered good data, and the test objectives were achieved," Mike Generale, NASA recovery operations manager in the Ground Systems Development and Operations Program, explained in a recent statement. "We were able to put Orion out to sea and safely bring it back multiple times. We are ready to move on to the next step of our testing with a full dress rehearsal landing simulation on the next test."

NASA and Lockheeh Martin, Orion's prime contractor, worked with the US Navy to attempt and measure various techniques designed to recover the 20,500-pound Orion spacecraft safely from the ocean.

Come this December, the Orion spacecraft will be streaking through Earth's atmosphere at nearly 20,000 mph, reaching about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit before splashing down in a wake of flying saltwater and steam. NASA hopes the landing will go off without a hitch, but if something does go wrong, the agency and its associates need to be prepared to make a speedy, but safe recovery of the craft. In order to achieve this, they have been running through a great number of scenarios with what they are calling the "Orion boilerplate test vehicle."

The team had previous encountered some potential difficulties last February during the first of these recovery tests, and have since been able to adequately address these problems.

This is also certainly not the last of these tests, as NASA continues to consider a number of options for their eventual primary test launch of the Orion spacecraft.