NASA chief Charles Bolden got an up-close look at the agency's NEXT-GENERATION VEHICLE for manned space exploration here during a tour of Lockheed Martin, the company that's building the spacecraft.
Lockheed engineers have completed a suite of structural, acoustic and vibration tests on key components of the spaceship, which is known as the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. Those evaluations are critical to the fabrication of an Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) spacecraft, slated for launch in early 2014.
The animation below shows how Orion is intended to replace the Space Shuttle.
Bolden said he felt inspired looking at the stacked hardware stretching 53 feet (16 meters) up in the Reverberant Acoustics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin's Waterton facility.
"It's trivial, really trivial, but to me, it's important. It's big. It's robust," Bolden told reporters. "That was the most impressive thing to me today."For the latest please visit www.33rdsquare.com
