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NASA’s Orion Launch Mars Mission Canceled, Rescheduled To Friday

By Niki Cruz
Published on: 05:21 PST, Dec 4, 2014

NASA’s plans to launch the Orion spacecraft deep into space has been temporarily scrapped and moved to Friday. Originally, as the Inquisitr reported, NASA had planned to launch the Orion on Thursday for its first initial launch. This launch would set the plan in motion, and represent the first in a series of tests that would eventually bring people to Mars for exploration.

Not only is this a huge move for NASA, but it’s the first big exploration since the program was put on hold in 2011. So why isn’t the Orion launching from Florida on time? Well, according to CNN, there was a bit of a glitch that occurred. A valve along with liquid-oxygen fuel didn’t open during the initial countdown. Due to this, the launch will happen Friday, 7:05 a.m.

NASA was intent on having the mission happen on Thursday as planned, but two and a half hours later and the kinks still couldn’t be resolved. The larger picture of this mission is that we will eventually see people on Mars. The projected year mapped out by NASA is 2030. We will start to see if this will be possible in 2020, which is the year slated for astronauts to go on board.

The Orion’s manager, Mark Geyer, said of the flight, “Part of me hopes that everything is perfect, but really on a flight test like this, we want to discover things that are beyond our modeling capability and beyond our expertise so we learn and fix it.”

Here’s what you need to know about the first launch on Friday.

“During this test flight, Orion will climb to an altitude of 3,600 miles (15 times higher than the International Space Station) and will orbit Earth twice. Four and half hours later, it will splash down in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles off the coast of Baja California. Two U.S. Navy ships, the amphibious transport dock ship USS Anchorage and the Military Sealift Command rescue and salvage ship USNS Salvor, will help NASA recover the capsule.”

For those who are waiting on pins and needles to see what happens with the Orion launches, NASA said that there will be a drone sent as well to provide live video feed.

[Image via TBO.com]

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